


Fidelity Decay

by synthetica



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Canon Divergence, Ensemble Cast, M/M, Time Loop, bdsm undertones but that comes with the territory, dubiously consensual forced redemption arc, eventual rating increase, how to love after a lifetime of refusing to feel emotions: an aquarian's memoir, slow burn but in the way a forest fire is that, the tohru adachi psychoanalysis 2011 me ordered, underage only on technicality, what if we were narrative foils and kissed by the inaba high voltage box
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:08:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29174691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthetica/pseuds/synthetica
Summary: Unsatisfied with the road chosen for him thus far, Yu goes back and creates his own.
Relationships: Adachi Tohru/Narukami Yu, Adachi Tohru/Persona 4 Protagonist, Adachi Tohru/Seta Souji
Comments: 31
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, you have to take a break from trying to make money with writing to indulge in an elaborate fix-it fic for a game that came out a decade ago. It's called self-care, look it up. 
> 
> Written with truly collaborative guidance from my partner in crime, [wwaywwardVvagabond](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wwaywwardVvagabond/pseuds/wwaywwardVvagabond), who is responsible for all my best ideas.

Yu’s often heard it said about him that he’s an extraordinarily patient person. It’s not exactly true, but it’s not enough to waste his breath disagreeing, which is really the root of the problem. He so rarely finds it in him to spend enough energy on most things to bother with being impatient, let alone intolerant of any process of time.

It’s only in the rare instances something stirs him he realizes it’s not true at all, not even close.

December comes, and lots of things happen after that. He leaves the first week of that month feeling shaken like a ragdoll, concussed and nauseous, head swirling with half-baked images. Cards hidden up sleeves, cheap beer—his first ever—on his lips, barefoot on the back lawn with each of his sister’s hands in one of theirs, knees touching underneath the table, breath on the shell of his ear, fingers—

The walls of a hospital closing in on a man losing control, a noose illuminated in four walls of red-and-black violence. An illusion shattered in a burst of gunsmoke and broken glass. The bearer of fog and a body limp in his arms. 

It’s past midnight when he reaches the gas station, a single light still on in the window along an otherwise dark street. It’s the glow of the Velvet Room door he’s after, though, and if the late hour surprises anyone there, they don’t stir. It’s only Margaret’s eyes that change at all, like she knows what he’s about to say before he beckons her. Sure enough, he says her name, and she’s already rising to her feet, book dog-eared underneath her arm.

They occupy the other side of the limousine when they speak. It’s just a formality. He’s never been too concerned about the particulars, but he’s pretty certain Igor could read his thoughts if he really wanted. Either way, it’s not too much of a comfort when he’s both fully aware he’s about to say something insane, and absolutely sure there’s no way in hell he can stop himself from asking it. 

He couldn’t even wait until tomorrow. How could he sleep?

Margaret sits down on the velvet seats once more, but Yu remains standing, not sure what to do with his hands but dig the nails into his palms some more. He knows his face doesn’t betray him, but it’s a forgone conclusion here.

“Is there a way to prevent this?” He thought about the wording all the way here, but even saying it, he's still not sure it’ll get the outcome he’s looking for. 

“I thought that’s what you were doing,” Margaret says, evenly. There’s a small, nearly imperceptible crease in between her eyes. There’s change, everywhere, all around him, and only God knows how long he’s been willfully blind to it. 

“Is there a way to prevent _him?_ ” He doesn’t want to say it. He can’t bring himself to. He hopes the acid in it is enough. 

“Is there a way to prevent a tiger from devouring its prey?” Igor asks in that drawl of his, just to prove he’s still listening.

Yu doesn’t have the energy for this, either. He doesn’t even look back. “Is there?”

He hates how it sounds in his own ears. Desperate. Just a little on the edge of crazed.

In reply, Margaret just takes a hand in hers and closes her eyes. 

There are conditions, of course. But not many. Nothing that would prevent the both of them independently arriving to their power, not that Yu thinks he could stop that if he wanted. Nothing that would break time, but he doesn’t entirely know what that means. But he has to believe in the thing that sent him stumbling back to the Velvet Room in the first place: that fate, this fate at least, isn’t an inevitability. If that’s the truth, then the rules shouldn’t matter. Or he’ll find out when he gets there.

He wakes up on his futon, early morning light from the dusty blinds of Dojima’s spare window dancing sunbeams onto the equally dusty table and illuminating the dormant television screen in stripes. Half of his belongings are unpacked, his clothes and a haphazard array of school supplies all splayed out with half-emptied boxes still taking up a corner under the cheap shelving unit. When he squints, he can just make out where he’s put his last ‘x’ on the wall. April 12th.

Yu tears the pillow out from behind his head and covers his eyes, pressing his fists into the sockets through it. It’s too late. Too late for the first, to avoid the sin entirely, too late…

He slides the pillow down just a little, taking a deep breath. It might not be too late for the second.

He moves through school unnerved by the photo accuracy of every conversation, the choreography of bodies moving through the hallways, the glints in his new (old) friends’ eyes, and he’s playing at every action like an actor with half-remembered lines. Beneath it all is an electrical current, calculating the degree of change from every movement and how soon it can carry him to the lobby of Junes, alone. 

The sun’s setting by the time he finds him, relief flooding through him at the sight of Tohru Adachi in his ill-fitting suit and blank expression leaning against the bike racks outside the store. It takes him longer to look up at his approach than Yu has ever been accustomed to, and it makes him feel off-center until his shadow passes over him and he watches Adachi’s eyes contort into that practiced doe-eyed ignorance, sharpening in a blink. This he knows. 

“Can I help you?” Adachi asks, just on the flat side of his usual facade. Not that anyone but him would notice. “I’m actually on break right now, so…”

“Yu Narukami.” Yu cuts him off by extending his hand, searching his face for a single shred of recognition, of awareness, and finds none. There’s just bewilderment, and a barely-there sharp upturn of his shoulders before they fall into that practiced slouch again. Yu clears his throat, says, “I’m Dojima-san’s nephew. I heard you’re his partner?” 

Adachi’s wrist is limp and his hand is clammy, leaving behind an unpleasant sheen of sweat in his palm, but it’s the first contact they’ve had since… God, Yu doesn’t even want to think about it anymore. He’s reluctant to drop it, but he takes care not to let it show, especially with Adachi so hasty to break the connection. 

“Uh, yeah.” Adachi twitches like he’s about to wipe his hands on his pants before thinking the better of it, plastering that fake smile even wider across his teeth. “Come to think of it, he did say you’d be in town. Did he tell you to introduce yourself or something? Sorry, kid, he’s so formal! We would have met sooner or later carrying him home after the bar… er…”

“I won’t tell him you told me that,” Yu interrupts, because he’s heard this schtick what feels like a thousand times, and he’s sick of it. “Look, I need to talk to you. Alone, preferably.” 

If there’s genuine suspicion or shock there, it’s buried under such an elaborate, obtuse masquerade that his wide eyes and parted lips just look comical, as if there was anything about this situation worth laughing about. “What do you mean?”

“I‘ll explain in a minute,” Yu replies, fighting the part of him that’s furiously insisting that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, that this will go south faster than he can blink, that he has to have a real plan and this isn’t one. He steels his eyes and shoulders, forcing himself to look at Adachi’s face, devoid of the knowledge and intimacy they’d built that he misses like a phantom finger, even if it was maybe never his to begin with. The mask is so empty without it. “Would you mind taking me to the station?” 

He mutters some bullshit about procedures and being on the clock and they’re going to ask questions, you know, but it doesn’t matter, because Yu has always been right about one, inexplicable thing. There’s something about him, something he doesn’t even understand himself, that makes Adachi want to listen. Even now, apparently, because it takes very little convincing to get Adachi to buckle, even though he knows well enough the signs of annoyance written across his brow. 

It’s not the best plan he's ever had. In fact, it might be one of the worst, but he has to at least try it, and it might as well be first. He’s brought to a familiar place, the interrogation room he’s learned doubles as Adachi’s informal office, and watches with a lump in his throat as Adachi locks the door behind them. 

He starts from what he knows, and studies the contours of Adachi’s face as they go from willfully ignorant, to genuine confusion, to a brief flash of horror, to a final crack of the mask it took Yu months and months to break the first time only to now watch it shatter across the floor. His thin lips snarl into a cold smirk that matches the dark, lightless pits of his eyes, and when he laughs, it’s not the unhinged, manic laughter of the shadow world, but rather a cruel facsimile of the passion it took to produce the first time, hollow and emotionless.

Yu doesn’t feel anything when cold metal presses against his temple, nor when Adachi’s foot finds the small of his back. His only thought before the barrel’s slammed down across his skull is simple, mechanical. 

_Well. At least one thing doesn’t work._

He doesn’t know if he’ll wake up after that, but he does, and the only emotion he can muster is mild surprise. Distant relief, maybe, but not in the way skirting death should pound at his heart. Instead, he just blinks in a new day, sighs at the blank white walls of his room, and tries to come up with something better.

There are a few more April 12ths that go about as well as the first, but at least he doesn’t end up with cold metal to the skull again. Yet. Chased out of the police station, cursed out by Dojima, fucking up the timeline and having to restart by not saying the right thing to Yosuke or Chie at the right time, come up as the suspect himself once or twice, yes—but he never makes that mistake. Mayumi Yamano can’t be saved, and he’s already long wasted that breath on Igor begging for one week more to no avail. Every time, though, Saki Konishi is still on the table. It’s just a few days, but it’s on the table. 

Twenty versions of that pass in a blur of time that is neither as slow nor as fast as the weeks have always felt, a temporal experience he has no words for other than a sense of otherness that remains alien from his own linear perception. Twenty loops, twenty forced ‘hellos’ through his lips to sound like the very first time, twenty impersonal handshakes with Detective Tohru Adachi, twenty anxious nights spent in front of a static TV, and the part of him that’s felt trapped in April 2011 for months before this already feels like the only part of him that’s ever existed. 

He watches Saki Konishi die seventeen times. He can’t bring himself to stick around for the other three. He gets Tohru Adachi to his dinner table, the only starting point he knows how to approach with any sort of confidence or sound strategy, about ten. If he counts the ones not concocted under ridiculous false pretense, it’s only three. 

Beyond the first and by far the most severe fracture, he catches a glimpse of the gaps between his mask once. 

Well, if he’s being generous with himself, which a pointed lack of results has made him disinclined to do, he’s seen micro-fractures. If he can call them that. The first time it happens, it’s not even intentional. The fact it’s an honest mistake might be worse, but he can’t say for sure he wasn’t looking to dig into something in the way his words so often are designed to do. It’s around the eleventh or twelfth, in the middling ones where he plays it close to the teeth, and he’s sweet-talked Dojima into yet another tour of the station right when he knows Adachi will be arriving in a hurry, five minutes late on the dot as usual.

The strange thing about the loops, he’s starting to realize, is that they aren’t identical even if his actions don’t change. According to Margaret, that’s not how time works. The structure of events that surround him and the forces that catalyze them won’t alter until Yu affects it, but small details shift here and there. What tie Adachi is wearing, the order Dojima categorizes the case files in under his arm, the few red lights in town they hit on the way there, things like that. Insignificant aberrations of change over time, according to Igor. 

It’s only after the brief glimmer of hope it brings is crushed he learns that, though. When he and his uncle arrive at the station on Friday to find Adachi already there, leaning on the shared rusted coffee maker and stifling a yawn with one hand, Yu feels something dangerous and anticipatory catch in his throat. He barely remembers to greet him as Adachi waves a lazy hand, raising his eyebrows in exaggerated pleasantry. 

“Morning, Dojima!” Adachi chimes, pulling down two mismatched mugs from the cabinet above that Yu guesses was last painted sometime in the seventies. “Oh, and Yu, was it? Nice to see you again!” 

Looking into the corners of his eyes for that telltale hardness feels like grasping at straws, but he does it anyway, chasing the corners of his faint wrinkles until they disappear into his uneven hairline. He’s careful to watch the timing of his reply, offering a quick, “You, too.” 

He’s heard this particular morning lecture of Dojima’s so many times he could recite it from memory complete with hand gestures if pressed, and it’s no more interesting hearing about Adachi’s intentional misfiling of busywork the tenth time around, so Yu tunes it out. Instead, he watches the bones of Adachi’s wrist strain against his gaunt skin as the detective pours two cups of coffee one after another, dark liquid right up dangerously close to the brim. 

“Cream or sugar?” Adachi interrupts Dojima mid-sentence to shove one of the mugs in his direction, flinching imperceptibly when a splash hits his thumb. 

“Not today,” Dojima replies. He softens a bit in tone, but he’s ever-so-careful to keep that scowl permanently plastered on. “You? I can’t remember the last time you were early enough to make it here.” 

“Nah,” Adachi dismisses. “You know me.”

Yu knows better than most, but somehow, he doesn’t feel like it would take keen eyes to notice the way his mouth quirks at the first sip, betraying the obvious lie. But Yu’s known that since June. 

“You hate it black.” It comes out before Yu can stop it. Or maybe just doesn’t try to. 

It’s brief, but Yu catches it because he’s looking too closely not to. His eyes widen, flat despite the arched eyebrows, and takes in a long sip, knuckles turning several shades white around the handle. His thin lips press into a line around the brim, but before Yu can study it further, he masks it over into neutral surprise, confusion lighting up his face. “Huh?”

“What are you talking about?” Dojima counters, spinning on his heel towards Yu and crossing his arms, accusatory. 

“Nothing,” Yu deflects, sizing up the particular masquerade of ignorance Adachi’s worn today as he half-heartedly calculates his own. “Just a guess.” 

It’s the truth, but when Dojima asks Adachi himself he denies it, of course. The detective laughs off the awkwardness with a weary sidelong glance, and Yu doesn’t miss the way their gazes linger for the rest of the brief, somewhat stilted visit, but it’s not any of his concern. It won’t matter come morning.

And it doesn’t.

He calls him ‘Tohru’ once, on the eighteenth run. He’s getting tired, sloppy, and he’s rapidly losing track of how many times he’s had Adachi in his home and when and why and for how long. He’s starting to blur the broad strokes and details, whether he’s supposed to press him against the fridge or wave from the porch this time to see him off. But he’s moved fast in this one, the desperation starting to wear at him soul and body, idly realizing in the back of his mind he’s eclipsed a real year in here. But to the rest of the world, it’s July, and they’re a tangled mess of sweat and teeth under the sheets, bleeding out summer heat.

It isn’t the first time he’s gotten him to bed. It’s easy, once Yu figures out the tricks. He thought age might be a deterrent, once, but that’s long out the window. If he pushes, Adachi relents with what Yu now recognizes might be, on anyone else, enthusiasm. 

But it’s not anyone else. It’s Adachi, and no matter how much he pushes in other areas, the stench of Ameno-Sagiri still clings to him like the densest cloud. But it’s Adachi underneath, and that’s the problem. That’s why he’s wasted a year, tossing over and over in an endless, restless sleep getting nowhere.

But there are nice pit stops along the way, sometimes. In the ‘real’ world, whatever that counts for anymore, they never got to this part. Sometimes Yu wishes that they had, because he loses his virginity in the fifth (and longest) loop and it’s nothing like he was told it would be, devoid of real intimacy and hushed with a hand to avoid suspicion. No matter how much Adachi plays it up, that time or any other, it’s just a hollow imitation of what Yu is really chasing after, and despite himself, what he’s chasing after has always laced with this inexplicable desire. He’d love to say he’d be here even if it wasn’t, but this road was already being traversed, albeit slowly, long before he stepped into the Velvet Room that night in December. 

It doesn’t make him feel better, but if everything is erased come the morning when he decides he wants it to be, even a shadow of it is better than nothing. He has no frame of reference for if it’s good or not, but the heat and skin is a great excuse to get up close, and a distraction from the ache of Adachi’s stubbornly lightless eyes when that closeness reveals the extent of Yu’s continued failure.

They never slept together in the real world, no, but Adachi said he could use his first name, once. If he wanted. He was half-drunk and more than half-asleep, one of those nights where he and Dojima both came home late and Adachi slept on the couch, almost blurred enough to be lucid. Yu was on the floor, TV on for pretense but long abandoned, consumed by the sensation of Adachi’s spindly fingers in his hair and his bony knee against the back of his shoulder. 

_You can use my first name, if you want,_ he’d said, slurred and muttered so low Yu barely made it out in time. _Just not when others are around._

Yu tested it out on his tongue. _Tohru._

He swears that just for a second he saw his real eyes then.

He never got the chance to try it again, and he’s been careful not to use it here, but sometimes, when he’s blurred into lucidity in his own way, it floats across his mind. 

It’s late afternoon in the eighteenth loop and he’s sweating out the poison of a year in ruins, hopeless and aching and frustrated and pent up and heartbroken. Adachi finds the delicate skin between the bones of his neck and bites down, and he’s everything around Yu, everywhere above him, and he feels like a man possessed when he slings an arm around his narrow shoulders and moans, “ _Tohru._ ”

This loop had been going better than most. They were close, maybe just as close as they were the first time if not more, but all the hope that had built up shatters when Adachi peels back. For a foolish second, Yu allows it to swell, drinking in the sight of a blessedly real look of confusion and vulnerability, red lips parted and brows furrowed over brown irises, but a drop is nothing to a man in the desert, and when Adachi blinks, all he sees is grey, impersonal and cold as the fog.

“I didn’t say you could use that,” Adachi hisses, tightening his hold around one of Yu’s wrists until he feels the bruise that will form underneath. He opens his mouth again like he has more to say, but whatever it is, he thinks the better of it, crashing into Yu with a kiss that’s all teeth and feels more like a punch than anything else. The only word he mouths between Yu’s teeth is a strained, “Apologize.”

Yu doesn’t bother replying, because he’s already decided he’ll wake up back in April tomorrow, and his words don’t mean anything to him anyway. Not this time.

He’s starting to lose hope there is a time they will. 

The real break is the twentieth, and it’s not even really Adachi that breaks. It’s Yu, and it’s a complete fracture. 

It’s May this time, and Yu feels more tired than he’s ever felt in his life. Every step, every day drags at him like creeping inertia, and he’s never felt more alone in his life, even with Adachi close enough to touch under the kotatsu.

(They haven’t, yet, and Yu’s beginning to think it’s the wrong approach to take. He’s not sure if it’s a relief or not.)

It’s not just Adachi, though his glimmers of humanity still taunt Yu in his every waking moment. It’s missing Yosuke, Chie, the rest of his friends who can’t know him in the way he knows them, and he longs for the Yosuke that can read his mind with a glance so badly it rises bile in his throat. He misses his friends, all of them, together in a way they haven’t been this whole time. He misses the feeling of belonging somewhere, anywhere, other than in a fight he doesn’t know how to win, and he feels himself slipping out of control, hour by hour, day by day.

It’s late. Not past midnight, but late enough that Nanako is long asleep and Dojima still has hours left at the station, leaving Yu, as he so often is, alone in his living room with Tohru Adachi, making every drink of tea last longer than necessary until the liquid has chilled.

It drives him crazy how he won’t leave, how he won’t just throw the last of Yu’s belief in him out with the bathwater and finally end this charade, but he never does. He always lingers, always takes such gentle care of Nanako, always wastes time he doesn’t have. It itches under his skin something fierce.

There’s not even a specific trigger, really. He’s spent too many hours like this in undefined spaces of time, sending his glance back between the TV and Adachi’s casual slouch that when Adachi asks him if he wants more tea, easy and polite as anything, Yu just knows he can’t take it a second longer.

“I know who you are, you know.” 

Adachi’s a good actor. A great one, even, but now Yu knows the signs. His weakness is feigning ignorance when confronted directly. Yu’s left it off the table until now for a reason. Adachi stops mid-turn to face him, still cross-legged on the ground below. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know who I am?” Yu presses. He leans his elbow on the table and stares up, ice in his eyes for a mask of his own. “I‘ve never been able to figure out when you put the pieces together. You’re not stupid, though, so I think you have to by now.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” Adachi dismisses, brows furrowed in a practiced mix of confusion and something not dissimilar to pity. It’s pristine. But Yu’s been around too long not to catch how his words spill faster than his normal drawl, or the slight tremor in his leg as Adachi turns back on his heel towards the kitchen before the sentence is allowed to hang in the air. Yu’s quicker, though, snatching his wrist with a bruising grip. It’s all bone and tendon underneath. Adachi’s slow to acknowledge him again, even as he freezes. “Seriously. You’re not making any sense.”

“I am,” Yu insists, firm. Adachi’s lips fall into a frown, but they don’t harden past the mask. Not quite. “And you know I am. You think you’re in control of this game, but you’re not.”

Something flashes in Adachi’s eyes, gears whirring behind the blackness. “What, you and I? I thought you were coming on a little strong, kid, but...”

“You could say that,” Yu cuts him off before he can think of any more bullshit to fill the silence. He tightens his fingers and uses Adachi’s limp arm to pull himself to his feet, staring straight into his eyes all the while. “But I’d appreciate it if you dropped the act. I know about the TV, I know about the girls, I know about your plan to use Namatame, I know about the fog, and I know what you are. I’m done playing around. So spare me.” 

“That’s a lot of crazy words in a row,” Adachi begins, slowly, calculated, but before he can get any further, Yu tugs down hard on his arm and twists, digging his nails in with full strength. Not even Adachi’s fast enough to suppress a wince completely. “It’s a little suspicious.” 

“You hate it here,” Yu continues, because now that he’s started, he’s not sure the floodgates will stop until he crashes headfirst into the end of this cycle. “You were sent out here as punishment, and you can’t stand this town. You hate me, too. Or at least you think you do.” 

“Oh?” Adachi tries to wrench his hand back, mask slipping into stone when Yu doesn’t relent. His expression fixes itself, but the light doesn’t return to his eyes, dark and matte and empty. Good, just a little further to the edge. “What makes you think you know that about me?” 

Yu considers for a second whether or not to say it. “Because I know you. I’ve known you for years.” 

He doesn’t have to waste time wondering if that will throw Adachi off-balance as the only detail that doesn’t align with his own secrets. It shows with another crack, a sneer pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Come on, even you have to know how insane you sound.”

“I know how this all ends, too.” Yu takes another step forward into the detective’s personal space until they’re toe to toe, their faces close enough he’s sure Adachi can feel his words ghost across his face. “We catch up to Namatame in November and you in December. You’re going to prison because you murdered two people. So, yeah. I know you.” 

Yu follows Adachi’s eyes down to the holster on his own hip, but whatever chill the sight of a gun would have once brought him is nothing but a dull roar in the back of his ears, barely a consideration over the rush of indiscernible emotion breaking over and over again in waves. Adachi licks his chapped lips, and in a low growl of a voice he mutters, “You really should shut your mouth right about now, you know.” 

“Or what?” For all his talk, it’s almost too easy for Yu to reach over and take his other wrist, another step driving Adachi up against the couch. Yu puts a knee between his legs to keep him in place, but he doubts he’ll have to worry much about that. He’s gotten his attention, now. “You’ll kill me? You couldn’t do that the first time, but good luck.” 

“If you’re right about me,” Adachi whispers, and when he blinks, there it is. There’s a grey cloud over his eyes, and his words are acrid and distorted, like static in a TV and only just loud enough for Yu to hear mere inches away. He swipes his nails, sharper than the look, against the skin of Yu’s own wrists. “I could take care of you right here and now. Not the smartest plan, Yu.” 

“You won’t.” Yu waits just a second’s pause to drive home that it’s not from the pain before he drops his hands with a force that pushes Adachi back into the cushions, a foreign noise catching in his throat. He braces himself back up with a knee, wiping at the corners of his lips with the back of a hand. “Wanna know why?” 

Adachi just glares at him, something feral in the way his lips curl that would have chilled him to the bone back around the first time. But he’s not scared of him anymore. Maybe he never really was. “Shut the fuck up.” 

They’re the words everything in this conversation has been peaking towards, everything this entire year has been leading up to and more, but now that they’re on the tip of his tongue, he’s choking. They come out just as frayed and worn as he feels, something heavy strangling him on the way out. “Because you’re better than this.” 

“Is that really what you think?” Yu doesn’t blink, after that. He’s not even sure if he breathes, too busy training every ounce of focus and knowledge he’s stored up to try and parse the effect of that, to try and make sense of something, anything happening deep inside. But it’s not his face or body that changes, this time. It’s his voice, and even with that twisted expression still plastered on, it’s impossibly small in comparison. All Yu can do is nod in reply. “Then you’re the dumbest fucking person I’ve ever met.” 

He might not be wrong about that, at this point. “That’s not even the dumbest part.” 

There’s a pause where he waits for Adachi to say something, to move, to even just react, but he doesn’t. He just stares at him like he wants to burn a hole right through his skin, and Yu feels himself slipping away. When he speaks, he hears his own voice as if in the wind. “I keep going back to April over and over again trying to find a way and prove it. You’ve already lost.” 

“I said, shut—” Adachi reaches for his gun, just a tiny, almost certainly ceremonial flick of the wrist, but that means the conversation’s done. There’s nowhere to go from here. Over and over again, brick wall after brick wall, there’s nowhere to go from here, and something has to break. 

He doesn’t have time to think about it, but he has time to spring forward, sprawl across Adachi’s hips, and grab hold of his wrist again, bracing Adachi down hard with his other elbow. He fumbles until he lines their hands up together, finger over finger. Yu can almost fool himself into thinking there’s something in Adachi then that’s so, so close to something real, but it must be his imagination. “What the fuck are you doing?” 

He knows Adachi won’t pull the trigger, so Yu closes his eyes, and takes the liberty of doing it himself. 

April 12th doesn’t come again. 

The last thing he sees is the shock on Adachi’s face, and not even long enough to properly appreciate its honesty before everything goes black. Well, black for a second before it fades into a familiar, glowing blue spreading out from underneath his feet. 

He floats like falling in a dream, exhaling into his slow and heavy descent feet-first until he reaches the solid ground of the Velvet Room limousine floor. He’s standing as he always does, facing Igor with Margaret and that same new, uncomfortable empty space on either side of him like they’re Yu’s perpetually unimpressed judges panel, but it’s been so long since he’s been summoned to it against his will he’s as off-balance as he was back in the real April. He stumbles into his first step, a headache coming on from the residual ringing in his skull. 

“Spinning our wheels a bit, are we?” Igor says, and if Yu knew any better, he’d be certain he was mocking him. “I sense some frustration.” 

Yu just rubs at his temple with the heel of his hand and stares right back at his bloodshot eyes, clearing his throat. Margaret closes her book with a sidelong glance and sets it on the table, folding her hands in her lap. The silence is thick, but Igor rarely seems to have any interest in his questions being answered. 

“You’ve tested a truly impressive array of strategies in attempting to best the machinations of fate,” Igor continues, spidery fingers spreading out across his jaw and tapping a slow and inscrutable rhythm. “I wonder, are you beginning to sense if there are limits to even your power and tenacity?” 

The way Igor talks tires Yu out on even the best days, but with the aftershocks of his brain rattling around in his skull, it’s excruciating. He grinds down on closed eyes, and when he blinks them back open, there’s an extra extension onto the car’s booths that wasn’t there before, looping out and around the table to form a seat across from Igor at a more than appropriate professional distance. Igor gestures lazily in its direction, and before Yu can think better of it, his feet carry him into its velvet embrace. It’s more comfortable than it has any right to be.

The silence is such a relief that it takes longer than it should to realize they are, in fact, waiting for a response this time. 

“What, are you here to tell me it’s too late?” Yu asks, not even trying to mask the annoyance. He expects it’s just another thing that’s a foregone conclusion in this place. “Really nice ride you sent me on, in that case.” 

Igor seems to consider this for a moment, the pace of his tapping increasing incrementally. That eternal smile is even more unnerving up close. “I fear there are constraints around the circumstances of your arrival that may prove to be insurmountable.” 

Something must show on Yu’s face, because Margaret straightens her shoulders and turns to Yu several degrees, blinking her gaze between the two briefly. “I believe what my master means to say,” she begins, pausing for a breath that might be meant for Igor to stop her. Either way, he doesn’t take it. “Is that April itself may be too late.” 

“Much of your situation was decided long before our introduction,” Igor seems to agree, Margaret folding back into her seat. “Your presence in this town was simply a catalyst.” 

“So is that it?” Yu asks, chest falling, the blood rushing to sink deep in his gut. It’s not like he didn’t expect this, didn’t brace himself for it nearly every time his eyes closed, but to hear it is another thing entirely. The unmistakable sting of failure spreads out through his limbs like an electrical shock that rattles his bones. He sighs, crossing his legs and arms as he leans back. “Did you already know that or did you just need me to test it?”

When Igor offers a hum instead of an immediate reply, Margaret takes the point again. “We had an inclination,” she hedges, even as her face remains as dispassionate as ever. “But it wasn’t a certainty. In truth, you’ve been buying us time to try to find a solution.” 

“And it is, is what you’re saying,” Yu extrapolates, feeling the blood cool into something like numbness, tingling and uncanny. It’s welcome, in a way. “There’s nothing I could have done from here.” 

“That’s correct,” Igor chirps, ever the stalwart bearer of bad news. “But, not all strands of fate are absolute. We have arranged… an alternate path forward, if rehabilitation is still what you desire most.” 

Somehow, that does very little to abet his headache in receding. It does get his attention, though. 

“You should be warned,” Margaret says, gold eyes flashing in the glow of the atmosphere passing by. “It cannot be undone. This sort of manipulation requires a delicate process, and even if you find you’d rather return to the current circumstances and decisions you’ve made thus far, it will prove impossible. Placing your arrival in Inaba before April will restart your journey in its entirety.” 

Yu lets those words pass over him and linger in the air, and then nods, because it’s not really a question for him anymore. If it was, this would have been over a long time ago. Longer than he would care to admit. “How far back would I go?”

“January,” Margaret replies. “We cannot affect his fate. Only yours.” 

Right. It’s so easy to forget Adachi came to Inaba before him, that their lives have somehow existed independently before the other. It seems like a fantasy now. “And you think that will be enough time?” 

Margaret slides her index finger between the page she’d marked, pulling it back into her lap and running her thumb across the spine. “If you accept, it will have to be. Your current methods aren’t sustainable. This reversal isn’t something that can be performed as many times as necessary.” 

“These conditions will provide a substantially higher probability for success than what you’ve encountered previously.” Before Yu can properly synthesize that, Igor starts up again, finally ceasing the tapping to fold his hands underneath his chin. His head cocks a little too far to the left to be natural. “But unlike here, even your most desperate of actions will prove permanent. Do you find this acceptable, Trickster?” 

Now he’s certain Igor is mocking him. But even if he had reasonable objections, Yu is too far gone past the point of reasonability for it to matter. The time to care about being too far gone was twelve to fifteen loops ago, and right now, he’s so tired, he’ll take anything. Wasting the now permanent time he has on further consideration is pointless. “I do.” 

Igor snaps his fingers and grows that piercing smile over the entire length of his hallowed face. “Very well.” 

When Yu wakes up again, it’s on a train, mid-morning snow flurries gathering frost on the cabin window as the countryside rushes by.

He stirs with a shiver, cold from where his face was pressed up against the glass, and for the first few seconds, he feels caught in that space between dreaming and reality, trying to take stock of his surroundings. That sensation has always accompanied such a particular time and place that he almost forgets why it’s this empty cabin and not his bed that he’s waking up in, but any lingering static of doubt is washed away like the rainwater that coats this town when the announcement rings, “ _Now entering Yasoinaba Station._ ”

Yu rubs the sleep from his eyes, a kink in his neck and a tight squeeze in his chest from the journey here. It felt like just seconds, but it couldn’t have been. His legs are stiff, but quick to warm up once he grabs his bags and finds the exit. The cold chills his bones to the core the second he hits open air despite the winter jacket wrapped over his shoulders, the first concrete clue he has that something might, this time, in fact be different. 

Part of him wonders if the Dojimas will show up at all or if Igor might find tying up such details unnecessary, but he swallows at least some of his prepared curses for the man at the sight of them past the ticket gate, Nanako bundled up and hiding behind her father’s legs. Her face doesn’t brighten at the sight of him; it only shrinks her back further into the shadows, but Yu smiles at her anyway, brighter than he ever could have managed the first time around. 

“Damn, you’ve grown,” Dojima greets, jacket slung over his shoulder like it’s not well below freezing. Yu makes a face at it, but it’s not noticed, so he doesn’t bother following up. “The last time I saw you…”

“I was in diapers, yeah,” Yu finishes with a grin before tossing his bag in the backseat of Dojima’s off-duty car, because he knows how it goes from here.

For now, at least. 

It’s not too long of a drive back, with no traffic to draw Yu from his reverie of making a paper crane for Nanako out of some brochure sheets in the glove box—a little token he’s discovered works magic in warming her shyness. Dojima is as clueless with small talk as he’s ever been, but it’s a dream for all Yu can feel. Despite how many times he’s traveled back to the start, it’s easy to forget just how difficult that first hour is, still filled with stilted silences not even Yu’s exceptional knowledge can quite fill. It’s only his second time replaying today, after all.

Dojima breaks the uneasy quiet with a sigh, rubbing his forehead as they pause at the only stoplight in town. “I don’t know what I was thinking, letting my sister send you today.”

“Why’s that?” Yu asks, strangely invigorated by a question he doesn’t already have the answer to.

“Sorry, it’s not your fault.” Dojima adjusts the mirror, giving a quick smile back to Nanako, who’s still nervously messing with her hands in the back seat. “It’s just… They’re dropping a transfer detective onto me. Some city hotshot, he gets in on the same train tomorrow. I told them to wait until Monday so I could help you get settled in, but no dice.”

Yu delicately folds another edge onto the wing of the paper crane, peering at Dojima from underneath his bangs. “I see.”

As discreetly as possible, he pulls out his phone to check the date, so deep in the sensation of newness that he’s completely forgotten until now. _January 7th, 2011._

So, this is where it begins. He examines the crane one last time, smiles wide, and pivots in his seat to hand it to Nanako, getting her attention with a nod of his head. She doesn’t light up like she does over a gift from a Yu she knows, but her eyes brighten as if on command, a shy smile tugging at her face as she exclaims, “For me?”

Yu just nods in reply and places the crane gingerly in her hand, careful not to crush it when the car lurches to a halt in their driveway. 

“Pain in the ass to drive to the station twice,” Dojima mutters as he puts it into park, dropping his voice down low so Nanako doesn’t hear. She hears all sorts of things she’s not supposed to, but Dojima will get that someday. “I won’t have to get up too early tomorrow though, so make yourself comfortable tonight.”

“We could go with you,” Yu offers, his mouth, for once in his life, moving just a step before his thoughts. He unbuckles his seatbelt, stretching his back against the seat before reaching for the door handle. “I don’t know about how Nanako feels about two car trips in two days, but.”

Yu has to hold back the wink when he looks to assess Nanako’s reaction to that, because he knows exactly how she feels about multiple car trips.

“Can we really?” She springs out of the car the second Dojima pulls the door open, her grip on the crane delicate despite her enthusiasm. 

“That won’t be necessary.” Dojima puts a hand to the back of his head and furrows his brows, but there’s a look in his eyes that lets Yu know this subject is safe to push—it’s one that won’t take long to break, either. “It’s just work stuff, and you’ve had a long trip already, Yu.”

“I think it could be fun.” Yu shrugs, slinging one of his bags back over his shoulder while Dojima takes the remaining load. His mind is still racing faster than his words can catch, but now that he’s lining up the facts, he’s confident in his spontaneous plans. He smiles down at Nanako, closing the door behind her. “Plus, you wanna meet your Dad’s new partner, right?”

He’d feel bad about utilizing her, but she’s just such an effective weapon. Besides, that’s what the crane was for.

“Of course I do!” Nanako insists, enthusiastic and so nearly the girl he knows and loves. “It’s not fair if we don’t all come to his train too.”

Dojima folds easier than the brochure paper by a mile, and Yu checks off his first win in the column. He doesn’t make a habit of getting ahead of himself, but it’s a bit more fun not knowing the script. He hides a smile behind the curve of his hand, and follows the Dojimas inside.

'Not too early' by Dojima’s standards is still eight AM on a Saturday, and while that qualifies as criminal by Yu’s usual schedule, he’s up bright and early like he’s tossed back the entire pot of coffee in the kitchen. Nanako, ever the early riser, is parked by the TV, but she springs to her feet fast and is in a substantially better mood than her father, who does take the entire pot of coffee and still insists on a morning smoke before getting in the car.

Dojima makes him sit in the back seat, which is fine by him, especially when Nanako tentatively asks for a paper crane tutorial. And who is he to say no?

Meticulous folds provide an outlet for his hands while his mind works, trying to fill in the gaps of his knowledge of Adachi as he first arrived in this town. What he’d been able to get out of Dojima about the man before Yu’s own arrival had been perfunctory and not particularly revealing, painting a picture of a man whose sins were no more or less obvious than the glimpses Yu has gathered. Very well.

The man they find on the station platform at least looks exactly as the one he found in April, save for a missing red tie and a rumpled hoodie over his ill-fitting suit. He looks just as tired, slouched over in that horrible posture as always with eyes dark enough for Yu to see even through the windows of the car. He sets Nanako’s crane aside before letting them both out of the backseat. Dojima lingers for an extra second to sigh performatively into the rearview mirror and place an unlit cigarette between his lips.

It’s raining out by the station despite the season, because of course it is. Yu often feels like the clouds follow this man around, clinging to the grey in his aura and bringing the darkness out into the skies. He looks every bit the kicked stray he must feel he is: damp, pale, and wide-eyed at the sound of their approach, stupid grin stickered on his lips.

Yu has to wonder, not for the first time, where this mask was created. It’s cinematic to imagine him on the train car practicing putting on that air of boyish obliviousness, twisting his lips and eyebrows to perfection in the window reflection and reciting pleads of ignorance in character voice, but he tends to think it’s just a decision he made one day. He woke up, decided that was how he was going to protect himself here, and slipped it on. It’s professional, respectable in a way. 

It’s not insignificantly pathetic as well. But he would hate that pity, and he’s not the only one who is skilled in the art of putting on a mask. 

Despite himself, acting excited to see him isn’t quite that strenuous.

“What’s this?” Adachi asks as they approach, running a hand through his rain-sprinkled hair. It’s somehow shorter and more haphazardly cut than before. “You bring the whole family? Well, what an honor.”

“We wanted to greet you,” Nanako offers from somewhere behind Dojima’s legs, poking her head out to offer a quiet smile. “We picked him up yesterday.”

“You mentioned something about your nephew coming up,” Adachi gestures lazily with his shoulder, barely looking over at Yu. “Guess it’s a dual welcome, eh?”

Yu is positive no one else catches the bitter undertone. Dojima attempts his most professional smile and walks up the steps to shake his hand, cigarette still between his teeth. He lights it, speaking between puffs of smoke. “It probably doesn’t mean much, but welcome to Inaba.”

Adachi’s eyes say, _no, it doesn’t,_ but his lips say, “You brought the whole brigade out for a real small-town welcome, so I can’t complain. It’s cold up here, though.”

“Both of you are underdressed,” Yu supplies as he follows up, well-covered in a light blue jacket. It occurs to him he’s never seen Adachi in winter appropriate attire in any timeline, and makes a note to follow up on that. “It’s a little different than Tokyo.” 

“Kyoto,” Adachi corrects with a light snap of his jaw, and that’s a new one. It seems ridiculous he’s never specified before. “But same difference. Is it always this… wet?”

“Basically,” Dojima shrugs, leading him back down the steps. Adachi peels out from underneath the awning with a frown, shoving his hands deep in his jacket pockets like he’s an unruly teenager and not an assumedly respectable detective. “You get used to it. Kinda.” 

He doesn’t look like he believes that even a little judging by the purse of his lips taking in the sleet-slicked streets, but he nods all the same. By the time he falls in line with Yu and Nanako around the car, his smile is so easy, it almost reaches his eyes. 

“You must be Nananko-chan,” he greets the girl at his side. She takes up the shadow behind Yu’s legs, and although it’s probably reflexive, he counts it as a victory. 

She nods and hums a little. “You’re working with Dad, right? You’ll probably be around a lot.” 

“We’ll see,” Adachi shrugs beneath the smile, leaning against the car without opening it in a mimic of Dojima, who’s sucking down nicotine and awkwardly staring out into the mountains. “Not everyone’s keen on mixing work and life.” 

Yu has to fight off a smile at that, because he still feels like he knows this version of him too. At least right now. “Of course you’ll be around.” 

Adachi looks at him like he’s grown an unnatural limb, and Yu shouldn’t glow under it as much as he does. “Oh?” 

“You’re partners,” Yu explains with a turn of his head, opening up the door for Nanako to slide into the backseat. As if to prove he’s still listening, Dojima gives an affirmative grunt around his smoke, taking one more long drag before snuffing it out on a nearby pole and pocketing the remains like a good samaritan. “I figure you’ll be spending more time with us than just about anyone.” 

“Huh,” Adachi says, flat. He obscures his face behind his passenger side door just enough to hide whatever cracks across it as Dojima moves to deposit his bags in the trunk, smaller and sparer than even Yu’s own belongings from the day before. Yu follows him down, unsure if it’s a relief or not to have a barrier between their faces again. “Well. Wouldn’t that be nice.” 

It would be, if he let it. Yu should know. 

But it’s time to make him mean it. 

Dojima puts his keys in the ignition, and the twenty-first cycle begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“Many approaches to time reversal have the set-up of an echo experiment, in which an initial state is propagated for a given time and then reversed. The comparison of the resulting state and the initial one constitutes a measure of the irreversibility suffered by the system during its evolution and generated by differences between the forward and backward dynamics within the propagation medium. In quantum mechanics, this concept can be quantified through the measure of the fidelity [decay].” [Loschmidt echo and time reversal in complex systems. Goussev, Jalabert, Pastawski & Wisniacki, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2016]_


	2. Chapter 2

There’s something off about this town, but Yu already knew that. 

He doesn’t know if it was always this way, or if it became this way because of what’s occurred, but there’s something eerie about its insularity, its over-familiarity with itself. In the loops, he dreamt of Ameno-Sagiri and blinking eyes through the walls by night, and by day he’d walk the streets with the phantom footfalls and creaks of shadow pursuers in his ear, imagining his name on the lips of every housewife he passed. 

Sometimes, he had dreams of Adachi and the room in the TV. He has a camera in the real world, somewhere inside his bags that he’ll go home and put half-hidden on his bookshelf. When Yu had pointed it out the real first time, he’d laughed and brushed the dust off, and Yu was patient, playing along with him in pretending to not know the settings. It didn’t seem like anything at the time, other than the way he maybe felt something shift when Adachi turned it on to snap a picture of Yu sitting on his bed, just one, before hastily putting it back. But he had dreams about that camera, too. There’s a human eye through the technicolor lens in the center, and it sees everything.

All it did was give a certain tangibility to something he’d already been feeling, though—that this place is too small to ever really disappear in, and there’s nowhere to fully hide. Someone, somewhere, is bound to one day know everything you do. If they don’t already. 

Maybe it’s because he’s used to the city and the cloak of anonymity it provides, as well as how pitifully easy it is to exist and never be truly seen at all if you desire, but even when it's been to his benefit he’s always felt exposed, a little too stripped-down. Holding his tongue comes naturally, and while there’s plenty of residents he feels comfortable enough around to let loose, he feels grateful for the ability when his instincts say to stand down. 

_Insignificant aberrations of change over time,_ Igor had said, and Yu wonders if that’s all it is when Nanako asks to go to the bathroom this time when it didn’t seem to cross her mind before. It’s especially curious it didn’t cross Yu’s either that it was something that happened the first time at all, yet it’s clear as day now when Dojima huffs but still rolls into town from that exit, a sudden unease as thick as the fog that covers the town rolling over him with it upon their arrival. 

The attendant is as impassive and pleasant as ever, but Yu still hangs back by the car, hands firmly in his coat pockets in preparation for their acknowledgment. To his surprise, though, it’s Adachi—with his hands bare to the cold and foolishly curled at his side as he too steps out for air—that they greet with a handshake this time. Yu even lingers just for a moment after they turn back inside the building to see if they’ll shake his as well, just for the sake of continuity, but they disappear and Nanako takes their place, Dojima ushering her back into the car. 

He doesn’t feel like he’s missing out on much, regardless. 

Even with the snow and sleet piled up on the sidewalks, it’s pure rain coming down from the sky with fog rising up in wafts from the streets, and Yu can’t imagine a more fitting welcome. Dojima turns on the car but doesn’t pull out of the lot just yet. Instead, he turns to the man next to him in the front seat, sitting slumped over with his head pressed up against the window.

“I was going to ask if you wanted to come over for dinner,” Dojima says, scratching at the back of his head. “But you don’t look so hot.” 

“Long trip, I guess,” Adachi laughs, light and airy, but Yu can see the way he rubs at his forehead from his own seat and easily imagine the obvious crease of pain between his eyes. “It might be catching up to me a little.” 

Yu would love to offer that something similar happened to him, even if just to see he could convince him to stay anyway for the sake of receiving better care than he’ll almost assuredly be giving himself at home, but he can’t say that. He’s long since learned that sort of admission doesn’t go over well in the room when it’s an obvious lie to this version of reality. Instead, he says, “We have medicine at home that might help.” 

He doesn’t miss the groan Adachi masks with his prompt reply of, “No, that’s fine. I’ll just rest.” 

“If you’re sure.” At first, Dojima looks like he’s about to argue with that by the hard line of his lips, but after a few seconds of looking at the man again, he just sighs and pulls the car back out into the street. “We’ll just have to take a raincheck until tomorrow, then.”

The breath Adachi lets out sounds like relief, but that’s to be expected. Adachi mutters out his address after fumbling around on his phone for it, and Yu holds his tongue. 

There’s something off about this town, about how it seems to break down the body of anyone who enters it, how the atmosphere seeps into the bones and fills up the brain with buzzing static. But he already knew that.

There’s something off about Adachi and how he looks back at the car as he walks through his apartment door, like he’s shocked Dojima bothered to wait until he got inside, and something even stranger about how he slams it behind him. But Yu already knew that one, too.

Somehow, he’s here anyway. 

He knows what Adachi’s apartment looks like on the inside, and Yu is fairly certain he’s the only soul in town who does. If the phantom eyes of Inaba have a limit, save for the most prominent eye of all implanted deep somewhere in Adachi’s amygdala, Yu imagines they stop right at his doorstep. The dim, sparse studio is covered in such an oppressive cloud of misery he’s suspicious anything could pierce its silence, save for maybe a few houseplants and a trip to Okina’s furniture store. Both of which he’s refused timeline after timeline, of course. 

Sitting under the bright yellow lights of Dojima’s kitchen, with their rays reflecting blinding streaks against well-worn linoleum and a full refrigerator dotted with memorabilia, Yu tries and fails to think about anything else. It’s no wonder Adachi slinked to the opportunity to spend time here whenever it was offered; he is fundamentally self-punishing, and it must have made crawling back into his hole at the end of the night all the more cinematic. 

The jury’s out on whether or not Yu qualifies as self-punishing in turn, but he gets no sick thrills out of imagining Adachi rolling out his threadbare futon, feverish and alone and cold from the permanent draft through his window, no sense of catharsis. 

Maybe, if it were any other loop, Yu would let himself give in to the warm allure of Dojima and Nanako’s hospitality and play at reacquaintance, but it’s not. The Yu he has to pretend to be wouldn’t be hung up on the details of what he doesn’t know, but the real him knows, and the real him can’t shake the feeling it’s wrong. He sees little sense in listening to ignorance. At least… not in this moment, with the late afternoon sun buried deep behind furious clouds and the town ready to devour its young. 

The whole point at this stage has to be that he knows what it means, doesn’t it?

“We should take some food to Adachi,” Yu pipes up during dinner, once there’s a lull in conversation long enough to justify it. “Maybe some aspirin.” 

“That’s a great idea,” Dojima agrees, smiling a little tight like he's embarrassed he didn’t think of it first. He might have if Yu had let him, but he doesn’t feel that kind of patient anymore. “I’d say Nanako could go with you, but it’ll be after dark by the time we wrap up, I’m afraid.”

Nanako looks a mix of scared and indignant, messing with the hem of her dress with a frown. Yu gives her a gentle glance, and offers, “I was thinking she and I could show him around during the day tomorrow if he’s better. He doesn’t report at the station until Monday, right?”

“I know where everything is,” Nanako nods, a beam of pride shining through her still-shy expression. “Could I really?”

He’d done a lot of planning last night, staring at the Dojimas’ guest bedroom ceiling for hours in a sleepless fugue. All the answers aren’t there, but he can at least look a few paces in front of him. Try and get his bearings in these first few desperate days. 

“I need to learn the town, too,” Yu explains, more to Dojima than Nanako. To his relief, he’s on his second social-anxiety induced beer and looser in the shoulders than this morning, so there’s little of that sharp detective suspicion Yu is accustomed to receiving at any suggestion. “I figured, you know, two birds one stone.”

“Well, that’s surprisingly considerate of you.” Besides, Yu knows by now that he’s grateful for the both of their arrivals in this city, him and Adachi, and he can feel the power of it hitting simultaneously in his laugh, lighter than he ever remembers this early. “I’m sure Nanako would love to play tour guide.”

Nanako grins at this proper, and it’s all Yu can do not to reach over and squeeze her hand gently in excitement like he does when she knows him better, when she relishes in his presence. He settles for smiling back as she says, “After we’ll have a real welcome party, right? We have to.”

“Of course, of course,” Dojima laughs again at the exaggerated pout that falls over his daughter’s face, reaching over to ruffle her hair despite her protests. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten.”

Something about their idle chatter then feels easy, familiar, and at some point, Yu looks up surprised at the night that’s begun to fall outside, early even for mid-winter. Still, Yu feels awake as ever, hopping up after plates are clear to help clean despite Dojima’s protests and pretending to listen as he dresses while Dojima explains the route to Adachi’s apartment. It’s a route he could walk in his sleep, but he nods along at the appropriate times anyway and asks where the medicine cabinet is for the sake of formality, letting Nanako fish out the tupperware rather than reaching for it himself.

He opens the fridge praying the details are still the same and tries not to let the relief show on his face when he finds a package of made-ready soba noodles, the fancy kind that costs extra. It’s not Adachi’s favorite flavor, it’s Dojima’s, but it’s one of the few things Adachi will eat without complaint and at least has some variety of nutrients in the mix. He takes the liberty of pulling a few snacks out, too, and with Nanako’s help arranges some fruit and vegetables into little bags, enough for a few days at the avian pace he knows Adachi eats at. 

With that, he tightens his scarf around his neck and makes his way into the cold Inaba night and towards Adachi’s red apartment door. 

Adachi’s apartment is just how he expected it would be, which is to say a vessel of nothing. 

He’s slow to answer the door, and through the thin walls, Yu can hear him groan and stagger to his feet to cross the room, each footfall heavier than the last. He looks shocked to see him, but Yu figures he’d be shocked to see anyone, and there are dark circles sunken into his pale skin, the color drained from his lips. If he remembers correctly, Yu hadn’t fared much better his first day by any stretch of the imagination, but on Adachi, all bone on a good day, the sickness looks a special sort of pathetic. There’s what appears to be a bath towel slung over his shoulders and he’s stripped down to nothing but a t-shirt and sweats, the apartment empty behind him save for his futon and a pile of blankets, his bag tossed into the far back corner.

“Oh, it’s you,” Adachi greets, flat. His bangs are slick to his forehead with sweat, shirt falling to expose pointy shoulder bones. “You’re Dojima’s uh… cousin?”

“Nephew,” Yu corrects, but he’s aware Adachi knows this.

“Whatever,” Adachi mutters before he seems to catch himself even in his haze, averting his eyes and stifling a sigh. “What, did he send you here to drag me out to dinner anyway or something?” 

Yu adjusts the canvas tote around his arm, leaning a hand on the doorframe. “No, I thought I’d bring it to you.”

Adachi wrinkles his nose at that. Yu figures he must be too tired to hide it. “What do you mean?”

“I brought you soba,” Yu says simply, claiming the curious tilt of Adachi’s head as a personal victory. “May I come in?”

Adachi hesitates for a moment, his knuckles whitening around their hold on the door before either hunger or keeping up appearances seem to win out and he shuffles aside, holding it wide open for him despite the draft. Inside, it’s somehow even colder, and it lingers even when Adachi locks the door behind him, seeping up through the floorboards. 

“He did send you though,” Adachi infers, leaning up against the doorframe and rubbing at his face with the towel. “Right?”

Yu shakes his head and hands him a small plastic bag of blackberries, his favorite. His face softens into shock—innocent, honest, and familiar. As much as Adachi can be any of those things. He takes it with a conspiratorial flick of the wrist, pulling out one as if to examine it for poison. 

“I thought it might be nice,” Yu offers, because for once, he has no reason to not tell the truth. “I figured you might not have the energy to cook, and there’s not exactly much around.”

“Well.” Adachi puts the blackberry between his teeth and chews like each motion is labor, which it might be. Yu remembers the headache was the worst part. He catches a flicker of a smile as it goes down, but it’s short and bitter if it exists at all. “How considerate. You shouldn’t get too close, though. Boss would kill me if I got his kid sick.”

“Nephew,” Yu corrects again, because there’s something fun about an Adachi that’s still lively enough to fuck with him but not fight back. It’s strange, and Yu thinks he might be a little fond of it. “I won’t bother you by staying, but I’ll set it out for you.”

It’s not that Yu thinks he can’t do it himself—he’s not that close to death’s door—but it’s a question of whether or not he will. Adachi seems to know this too, working another berry between his teeth with furrowed brows before he sighs, “Sure. Whatever. There’s a few bowls on the kitchen counter.”

It’s a dismissal, but Adachi stalks after him anyway as if he’s nervous he’ll chip one of his 500-yen plastic cups if he leaves him alone. He watches from the doorway between the living room and the kitchen like some sort of rental grim reaper, hallowed under the cheap fluorescent light.

“Kinda pathetic, getting taken care of by some high-schooler on my first day,” he says as Yu quietly pours the noodles into the bowl, thankfully still steaming from the short walk to his apartment. He knows full well Adachi doesn’t own a microwave, and if he owns more than a single rusty pot he’s never seen it. “I would have been fine. You must be a real generous guy to go out of your way like this for just anyone.”

Yu knows he would have been fine, by his standards. But fine by Adachi’s standards is spending the night in a cold sweat half-starved and freezing, and that’s not exactly Yu’s standards. He reaches around a shopping bag for a single glass hidden at the back of the counter and rinses it out before filling it up. After procuring a small handful of aspirin from out of his bag, he hands both to Adachi, stirring the soba impassively as he studies the man’s pained expression.

“The force taught me to never take drugs from kids,” Adachi laughs, too dry to quite sound like a lighthearted joke. Yu thinks it’s funny anyway, but maybe not in the way he intends.

“It’ll help your head.” Yu rolls his eyes and stares at him until he seems to get the hint, lowering his eyes into a line before they close and he tosses the pills back, downing half the glass in one go. He wipes at his lips with his arm after, and only then does Yu hand over the bowl of soba, like rewarding a dog who’s just learned a particularly impressive trick. “So will this.”

“Thanks,” Adachi says after too long a pause, like he’s just remembered to say it. He messes with the chopsticks Yu included with it, testing a noodle on his tongue. It’s infinitely better than nothing. “You really didn’t have to.”

Yu pulls the strap of the canvas bag back over his shoulder, offering Adachi his best smile, the one he reserves for friends and old women he’s trying to charm at the market. “I know, but it was the right thing to do.”

No part of him wants to leave him alone like this, in this dark apartment with nothing but a few odds and ends for company, but it can’t be helped, not when he has to play the long game this time. So instead, he just leaves him with a wave over his shoulder and a soft glance when Adachi turns around to watch him go.

“Is that so?” he wonders, and Yu could ask the same. But he won’t, because it’s past time for that.

Yu has always been of the opinion that it’s important to admit ignorance, even if just to himself. There’s little to be gained by pretending to know what he doesn’t, and an incredible amount to be gained when he shuts the hell up, watches, and learns. 

That said, he spends a lot of time thinking he’s sure of things only to be proven spectacularly wrong, so what does he know anyway? 

To be fair, he’s never claimed to know Tohru Adachi, because that would be ridiculous. No one really knows him. He doesn’t even know himself, and he’s spent a lifetime locking that away tight. Still, Yu would consider himself to be the person who knows him best by having the closest crude approximation to something like the truth. He’s certainly studied him with scientific fervor. 

He could write the book on him if anyone else would ever read it. He knows how he thinks, what drives him, what plagues him, what he looks like when he thinks no one’s watching, what his voice sounds like when he stops faking it. If nothing else, Yu is confident on the outlines.

Walking down the shopping district with him and Nanako under the afternoon sun, Yu starts to wonder if he really ever knew him at all.

This version of Adachi isn’t even that different, not in a way he can put his finger on. He still acts dumber than he is, is still much kinder with Nanako than he has any right to be, still lets the light seep out of his eyes when he thinks he’s out of frame, still…

“This way is the shrine,” Nanako announces, tugging on Yu’s wrist to rush him along. He’s always been a fast walker, but Nanako goes everywhere like she’s on a mission, and he supposes today she is. He’s aware Adachi can be brisk himself, but he’s slouched over and taking his time today, hands in the pockets of his thin yellow hoodie, seemingly determined to stay a stubborn few paces behind. “People say it’s scary at night.”

Adachi doesn’t look too impressed, he hasn’t with anything, but no one but him would think to interpret his dopey smile in that way. Certainly not Nanako, who he beams at whenever she looks his way. “Oh, wow.”

“There’s a lot of bugs in the trees during Spring,” she points to the grove as they make their way up the stone path. Then, more quietly than Yu thinks Adachi can hear over the chatter of other patrons, “Sometimes I come here to pray for Mom.” 

Yu reaches down to squeeze her hand, gentle, and she peers up at him, sheepish and sweet. “I’ll have to come here sometime, too.”

“Man,” Adachi says, approaching the offering box and peering in without really absorbing it, just a quick scan of his eyes. “I should have known something was up when Dojima said to come over at two.”

Nanako drags the both of them up to stand with Adachi, running up the steps above him until she’s almost at his height. Out of the corner of his eye, Yu thinks he sees the tail of a fox duck behind the building. It’s a suspiciously nice day, besides the bitter cold, and Adachi’s doing a poor job of pretending to not be freezing, his arms trembling slightly beneath the fabric of his coat.

“You’re getting the full tour,” Yu winks, and Adachi just curls his lip up at him, like he can’t decide if it’s worth trying to react to. “I need one too, and Dojima had to go shopping anyway.”

After staring into the shrine for a minute herself, Nanako seems to decide this is satisfactory and hops back down, leading them with a skip down the path again and back out into the street. 

“Well, we do have a pretty good tour guide,” Adachi laughs, nudging Nanako a little with his elbow. It drives Yu crazy. It drives him crazy how he just… says things like that, unprompted, so charming and intentional like he’s trying for her. “Don’t get us lost, eh?”

“I won’t!” Nanako insists, full of seven-year-old earnest offense. Adachi just laughs at that, and Yu can’t help but join, too, because she looks so cute like that and it shouldn’t be this nice, but it is. He’s never quite known what to do with that. “See, there’s Katsumi Textiles!”

“Tatsumi Textiles,” Yu corrects gently, sending a conspiratory glance to Adachi over her head. 

“Wow, maybe I take that back,” Adachi teases, flicking one of her pigtails and pretending to reel back when she turns her full ire on him.

“That’s what I meant,” she huffs, and Yu squeezes her hand again until she calms down and can find humor in it too, rolling her eyes and leading them up to the storefront. “Everything they sell is super soft, but it’s really expensive.”

“That’s because it’s handmade,” Yu supplies, before wondering if he’s supposed to know that. There’s nothing on the sign to indicate it, something he realizes with a jolt reaching for the handle, but it’s not too far-fetched of a deduction. Still, he offers over his shoulder, “I read about it online.”

Either way, this seems satisfactory for Adachi, who holds the door open for Nanako with a shrug before following them inside, a soft bell signaling their arrival. From behind the counter, Kanji’s mother offers her greeting, and Yu once again misses the one she used to reserve for Kanji’s dearest friends enough to cry. 

But he doesn’t. Instead, he reaches for a scarf on the display wall and prays Mrs. Tatsumi won’t somehow comment on the fact that the one around his neck is from a collection she hasn’t made yet. 

Nanako releases her hand to go play with fabric swatches of her own, but Yu’s focus is squarely on Adachi, still lingering by the door like he’s an uninvited house guest. Yu subtly crosses over to him through the lines of fabric until he reaches a display rack of winter jackets in between them, rifling through the sizes and beckoning him over.

“You’ll need something warmer than that,” Yu says, gesturing to the hoodie around his body. Adachi just rolls his shoulders, dropping the cross of his arms that definitely aren’t a ploy to retain body heat. 

“I’ll be fine,” Adachi insists, using what might be his favorite phrase. Yu still doesn’t buy it. He pushes through jacket after jacket until his eyes settle on a steel grey peacoat, narrow and sleek and not dissimilar to his own, albeit a much darker shade. “It’s not that bad.”

Yu holds the jacket up, raising an eyebrow. “Something like this.”

Adachi scoffs, but Yu doesn’t miss the way his eyes widen, just a hair. Still, he pushes it back further into Yu’s hand, shaking his head. “For what, 10,000 yen? Not on my salary.”

“Hmm,” Yu hums, feigning disappointment. It's actually more, but that reaction doesn’t surprise him and the gears have already been turning.

After Nanako has thoroughly exhausted her option of brightly colored patterns to touch and she starts heading for the door, Yu dismisses Adachi to go with her while he hovers by the fabric wall. “I’ll be right out, I’m going to special order a scarf.”

Thankfully, Yu doesn’t sense too much suspicion in Adachi as he closes the shop door behind them. Once they’ve safely turned away, he grabs the jacket and quickly turns back around, snatching the scarf Nanako spent the most time looking at from off the shelf as well—a pink and orange floral motif that will suit her brilliantly—and a pair of deerskin gloves for his uncle from the front display. He tucks his own scarf around his neck down into his coat before approaching the counter. Just to be safe.

“All good choices,” Kanji’s mother approves, as kind and gentle in her demeanor as ever. He can’t wait to meet her son again. “I haven’t seen you around before, but I must say, you’re quite fashionable.”

“Thank you,” he beams, reaching for his wallet and rifling through the bills. Thank God Igor doesn’t rob him in between these things, or else he might actually have to resort to murder. “I think you’ll be seeing a lot more of me.”

When Nanako curiously peers into the bag and blows his cover by pulling his purchases right out for Adachi and the world to see the second he gets outside, all Yu has to offer is a brisk, “I lied.”

He can’t decide if Adachi wants to kill him or run into the woods so far Yu won’t ever find him, but predictably, he does neither, just widens his eyes far past the point of what should be human possibility and stutters, “You… no, yeah, no, no way.”

“Put it on,” Yu commands, crossing his arms and tapping his foot. Like the perfect accomplice she is, Nanako gets the hint in seconds and mirrors his stance, demanding the same with unflinching seriousness. “You too, Nanako.” 

“For me?” She asks, reaching back into the bag and pulling out the scarf underneath, her eyes lighting up into a megawatt grin as she slings it across her shoulders and twirls, reaching over to tug on Adachi’s hand for the first time. He freezes on impact, still staring unblinking at Yu. “Come on, you gotta try it!” 

For more than a second, it looks like he’ll object, but he just says, “This is absolutely crazy.”

“I have money,” Yu explains, like that even comes close to covering it. “Think of it as my welcome present. I bought something for Dojima too. I’d rather not have him come home complaining about you complaining about the cold every night.”

“I wouldn’t…” Adachi starts before appearing to decide that’s even too much of a lie for him and grips tightly around the fabric, almost like he’ll rip it apart if Yu makes him flinch. So he stands still as a statue until Adachi’s body heaves into a sigh and he peels the jacket out of its careful fold and slugs it on one sleeve at a time, grumbling something under his breath all the while.

It fits him perfectly. By the crunch of his eyebrows, he seems to know it, too. 

“You look great,” Yu says, before reaching for Nanako’s hand again to let her whisk them away to somewhere else before the moment catches up to them. It’s probably wise to not let it linger.

Looking over his shoulder to catch Adachi twisting his torso in the reflection of the shop window, mouth parted and face still drained from color in shock, Yu thinks he might understand, just a little bit more, what the difference is.

This Adachi is still malleable. 

After that, Yu sits back and does what he does best—he observes. 

It’s almost like watching a dog walk on its hind legs, seeing Dojima interact with Adachi on a level that still has a veneer of professionalism and respect. It’s no less strange to see Adachi so blatantly out of his element in turn, hands in his lap and tone still polite and deferential without any cloying obliviousness. His nerves are genuine, sweat beading underneath his white button-down and hands wringing around his beer can when he thinks no one is looking. 

It’s a far cry from his practiced awkwardness, all put-upon with staged peaks and valleys when he talks. He stutters into every sentence and hasn’t turned to leaning into it yet, unable to look anyone in the eye when it’s his turn to talk. He eats slowly, likely as an excuse to engage even less, but still jumps and takes a drink every time Dojima addresses him like he’s been braced for it all along, always ready with a gentler tone for Nanako without a great transition. It’s green in a way Yu’s never seen, and he wants to bottle it up and save it to look back on because he can’t help but feel everything’s flashing by too fast to understand the way he wants. 

It doesn’t mean anything different than what he thought it might, but it means _something,_ and he can barely dare to interrupt the delicate dance enough to speak unless he’s spoken to. Or spoken about.

“Your nephew’s a little charity worker,” Adachi laughs. The segue from a conversation about the sushi price, which Yu is certain was more than the already high figure Dojima had just lied and said it was, jars him out of his focus with a stir. “Guess he gets it from you.” 

“What do you mean?” Dojima asks, cracking open his second beer of the evening. Adachi is already halfway through his; enough nights together have taught Yu it’s a nervous habit. “I’d love to take credit, but it’s been years since we’ve seen each other.”

“He bought us all little gifts,” Adachi drawls, looking at him across the table with a hardness in his eyes that is very, very familiar. It’s gone in a blink when he turns back to Dojima. “As a welcome present. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”

“Did he now.” Dojima slides his eyes over to Yu, and he freezes with his chopsticks over a piece of inari, pinned down to his actions by it in a way Adachi’s incredulous glances haven’t been able to make him feel all afternoon. Even the way Adachi looks now, still half out of his element and slouched in on himself gets him high on his own stupid bravery like the cat who caught the canary, but Dojima has a way of making him the canary. It’s not the first time today he's wondered if he’s been too bold, but this is the first time he feels caught out for it, like his sheer desperation has been scrawled out on his forehead this whole time. He reaches up to adjust his bangs, half-worried Igor actually has plastered a tally of failed attempts across it, but it’s dotted by only his own worry lines. He does his best to smooth them out while Dojima chews on a piece of sea urchin. “I thought that scarf of Nanako’s was new.”

“He took us to Tatsumi,” Nanako pipes up, enunciating each letter with pride. The only problem with using Nanako as a weapon, Yu forgets, is that it can so easily be turned back around on him. “He got Adachi a coat, and a pair of gloves for Dad too!”

“Oh, wow,” Dojima remarks, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Yu to do it, peering at him over his beer can with a single raised eyebrow. “Those pieces are pretty dear, I guess you do have a charitable streak.”

It isn’t like the silence after that is unusual or deep, but to Yu, it’s oppressive, like the whole neighborhood rather than just the whole table is waiting for him to finish his fried tofu and speak. “I wanted to say thank you for hosting me.”

“Even me?” Adachi asks, twirling his chopsticks up as he rests his jaw in the palm of his hand, pointing them towards Yu with a flick. 

“Yours was a welcome present.” Yu wishes he had his own drink to hide behind, something to take the edge off how that curl of his lips feels like a knife, but he settles for his tea, taking a long slow sip. “Moving from the city is hard.”

Yu can tell his reaction to that is genuine too, because his eyebrows fall into a low, hard line before they widen into something more complex, something soft Yu doesn’t have a chance to parse until it’s smoothed over with a laugh into a plastic facsimile of surprise, shiny and cold. “See what I mean?”

Dojima nods at that, and Yu feels his face turn red underneath his focus, hot enough to cut whatever’s whirring behind those eyes off with a quick, “I had a really good job back home.” 

“I see,” Dojima’s face cracks into just a tiny bit of a smile, but to Yu’s relief, it doesn’t feel like one borne from disbelief. “Doing what?”

Yu didn’t think this far ahead, but he shoves a piece of tuna in his mouth to mask that, trying to ignore the anticipation hanging as he swallows it down. “Uh. Media programming.”

He has no idea what that means, but thankfully, it seems Dojima doesn’t either, and he doesn’t seem interested in lowering himself to clarify. “Well, I’m not going to tell you how to spend your money, but I’m not looking forward to getting shown up on welcoming duties to the guys at the station.”

“Sorry,” Yu says, unable to stamp down his smile of relief at the sight of Dojima finally, finally closing his eyes and shrugging. Yu’s chest expands for a full breath of air for the first time in minutes. “It was a little spur of the moment.”

“I’ll just have to get you something, too,” Dojima replies, whatever imaginary cloak of tension Yu was under slowly dissipating into the air. If he feels Adachi’s gaze boring into the side of his skull, well, that’s a tension he can live with. Dojima rubs at his stubble and reaches for a piece of salmon. “I wish they included more than one urchin in these things. Are either of your birthdays coming up?”

“Mine’s December twenty-second.” Yu barely stops himself from answering with Adachi’s on impulse, if only for the thrill of knowing it. “So it just passed.”

It’s Adachi’s turn to feel pinned under something now as three sets of eyes turn to him across the table, but it’s not as satisfying as Yu imagined, his face turning several shades paler as he looks down at his hands, running his thumb over the lip of his bottle. He pulls at the collar of his button-down and finally mutters, “February first.”

“Brilliant,” Dojima declares, and Yu doesn’t miss the way Adachi jumps at that, a twitch of his shoulders and a tightening of his knuckles, jaw clenching beneath his thin skin. “That gives us time to whip something together, right Nanako?”

“Right,” Nanako chimes in, all sunshine even in the glow of night through the sliding door. Even Adachi melts a little under it, shoulders falling back down from his ears by degrees. “You’re gonna be around lots, won’t you?”

Yu watches as they zip right back up to hug his neck in a blink, Adachi tossing his eyes back and forth between the two Dojimas like he’s lost a script. If Yu were able to feel Adachi’s hands, he’s sure they’d be as they always are when he feels cornered like this, cold and clammy and hair-trigger to the touch. Yu has the dizzying thought of reaching under the kotatsu for them, but he doesn’t dare. “Well, I’m not sure about…”

“Nonsense!” Dojima claps a hand down on Adachi’s bony shoulderblade, hard, and Yu has to fight down a litany of unwise reactions when Adachi honest to God squeaks at that, surprised and just a touch indignant. “I don’t know how things worked in the city, but now that you're here, treat us like family. Both of you.”

Nanako agrees with a firm nod and a hum, and in the space after Dojima’s hand falls back to his own drink, Yu’s caught in the pull before he realizes he’s met Adachi’s eyes across from him, and he really feels like the canary, now. It’s not just that there’s a blank darkness just underneath the surface—he’s used to Adachi’s anger, his catatonic emptiness. It’s that there’s something else there, too, a scrap of a question that Yu doesn’t know how else to answer than with putting a warmth into his eyes he knows won’t be returned. Adachi does turn from it, though, and it’s a testament to the strange way they’ve always worked together that Yu counts it as a victory.

Still, Yu refuses to give up being the cat just yet, so he nudges Nanako with his elbow and winks, lifting his mug of tea just slightly in playful suggestion as he offers, “To family?”

That smile he loves so much finally breaks across her face and lights up her eyes like a flashbulb, cheeks flushed with a joy he never fails to be so proud to be able to cause. She raises her own mug high in the air, thankfully empty with the amount of vigor she throws into it, and announces, “To family!”

Dojima is quick to follow after, a fond silent laugh on his lips and a red splotch of embarrassment across his own face, and Yu has already had his elbow propped up in position from the start. Once again, it’s Adachi under the microscope, and in the vacuum it creates, Yu wills himself to memorize forever the look on his face, a cross between gobsmacked and terrified. There’s a silent, hidden fury brewing somewhere for Yu in the creases, but it’s wholly swallowed up by unmistakable, organic shock, frozen like he’s been electrified, and Yu can’t get enough of it. 

It’s an Adachi he feels like he would have killed for just weeks ago, unpolished and new but so recognizably him it makes his stomach churn, because Adachi was wrong that day in the TV. Yu was wrong earlier today about himself, too. He’s always known him. 

It takes Dojima hitting him with his elbow in turn, but eventually, Adachi glances at Yu like he’s afraid he might be some sort of monster and stutters, “To family.”

Yu hides his expression around the rim of his glass when it’s their turn to meet each other’s eyes, because it’s true, maybe he is some sort of monster.

After all, there’s no better solution to a monster than another. 

He’s not really surprised to wake up in the Velvet Room that night. It seems like the sort of thing that would happen, based on circumstances. 

Sure enough, he barely feels like he’s slept at all by the time he’s yanked out of a dream of the city and floated down to the limousine floor, the cool wash of unreality stirring him awake. That part is to be expected. 

What isn’t to be expected is who is there to greet him.

“Marie?” Yu hears himself ask before anything else leaves his lips. Stunned, he blinks at the small girl that’s settled back in at Igor’s side like there was nothing ever amiss to begin with, legs crossed and unwilling to indulge in his attempts at eye contact as usual.

In response, she shrugs her shoulders up to her ears and digs her nails into her forearms, tangible as the last day he saw her. She nods her head, chewing on the corner of her bottom lip. “Hey.” 

Across from her, Margaret offers a quiet, fond glance over the top of her book before setting it down unmarked on the seat at her side. Marie loosens a little at that, but it’s still Margaret who takes the liberty to speak first, Igor sitting between them and staring, as always, at Yu and Yu alone.

“It seems there was an unforeseen, but welcome side effect of the time reversal,” Margaret begins, adjusting the cuffs on her uniform sleeves with a roll of her wrists. “Though I’m afraid it hasn’t given the answers we’ve hoped for.” 

Marie’s legs sway under the desk, mysteriously just always stopping short of hitting Igor’s knees. “I don’t know what happened and don’t remember jack, is what she means to say.” 

He really missed someone willing to talk straight around these parts. It wasn’t something that necessarily crossed his mind before, but now that he’s facing the three of them again, the thought of going through this without a true moderating force is a bit dizzying in retrospect. Margaret, as wonderful as she is, is not necessarily the most approachable with these sorts of things, and Igor…

“I’m glad you’re here,” Yu says, and he counts the red on her cheeks as a tacit admission of at least being glad to see him in turn, if not for her circumstances. 

“This place is removed from the flow of time,” Margaret explains, and it’s been said so many times at this point that Yu could mouth it along with her with the exact same cadence. If he were so inclined to do that sort of thing. But he could. “But she’s been here since you arrived, with seemingly no memory of why she left or to where. It appears there’s much left to decode.” 

Marie meets his eyes for a split second, and within it, Yu can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt, skin burning with a discomfort he’s let itch in the back of his mind without ever truly stopping to scratch. It’s not as if he didn’t care, of course he does—he couldn’t fake the relief he feels at seeing her again if he didn’t—but even with Margaret’s assertions that the loops would keep Marie’s situation locked in stone until she could find her, just like the rest of the ‘real’ world was kept frozen out, he still chose to pursue this first. 

The inkling that there’s something more he’s not grasping isn’t lost on him, it hasn’t been this entire time, but that isn’t a solvent for the clear result of his priorities. They brought him here, and now that he’s facing someone else he’s still failed to really fully save, there’s no way to explain it to her through the tightness in his throat. He can’t even explain it to himself.

He’s never been interested in what the reasoning would reveal if he tried. But he missed her, and he’s sorry as he can possibly be without daring to take it back. 

Igor switches the cross of his legs after a beat of silence, and as if on command, the two at his side straighten their shoulders to turn out to Yu almost imperceptibly, the atmosphere outside shifting in its flow just so. He clears his throat to speak, as if Yu hasn’t been waiting for his inevitable unadulterated opinion on the situation every night he’s slept here.

“A fundamental reversal is always bound to reveal certain anomalies,” Igor drawls, staring down the length of his nose and wrapping his steepled fingers together. “However, it also reveals its most stalwart consistencies. I wonder, are you perhaps emboldened by your most desperate actions being permanent now?” 

Yu’s not surprised by that particular thinly-veiled insult, either. “I’m not exactly convinced moderation is the answer after twenty failed tries.” 

The low neon lights of the room flash against Igor’s teeth like a shark in shallow waters. “The clock is ticking, but I assure you it is not so loud it need be the only master you obey.” 

The allure of closing his eyes and forcing himself back to sleep is not new, but it has never been stronger. How pointless it would be to try is the only thing stopping him, regrettably, so he just sighs and puts a hand on his hip, the other rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “If you’re telling me it’s been over the top, I know that.” 

“Oh?” Igor implores, and Yu could swear his head moves just a single mathematical degree to the side. “It would be rather wise, Trickster, to always have a method for the madness.” 

Yu wouldn’t go so far as to call anything he’s done so far or plots himself doing out on some hypothetical horizon a method, he’s not that generous, and he’s half-convinced it’d just lock himself up in his own head to try. If he had to name it, it’d be that he thinks he knows him, and he’s been putting that one inclination above fact and reason for so long anything else would be counterintuitive. He knows how Adachi left earlier in the night, tired and drunk and calling him ' _weird as shit, you know,_ ' under his breath out the door, but flush with something suspiciously close to light behind his eyes, brief and flickering as it was. 

He knows the way Adachi looked trying not to cry at Nanako’s bedside back in the hospital when he thought Yu hadn’t entered the room yet, the way he never really got over that he was there at their dinner table for months before first. He can’t pretend to know the weight of these first few nights in this town, but he knows they hung heavy, and he knows…

Maybe he just wants to do the things he was never there to do. Maybe he knows he can’t stop himself.

Maybe it’s all the same. 

“I know what I’m doing,” Yu finally sighs, lost to just how long he let Igor’s words linger in the air before answering. “It doesn’t have to work yet.” 

“Well.” Igor splays his hands out in front of him, long fingers open in a concession Yu has no hope of reading the intent of. “Then that’s all that matters.” 

Naively, Yu hopes that for once they’re both telling each other the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sovietminds) or [tumblr](https://historians.tumblr.com/) if you are so inclined. 
> 
> As always, this is the brainchild of [wwaywwardVvagabond](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wwaywwardVvagabond/pseuds/wwaywwardVvagabond) and I, so go check them out!
> 
> Not that anyone cares but us, but for clarification: Yu arrived on Friday, Adachi on Saturday, and this chapter ends on Sunday. So, stay tuned for the scooby gang and police work as normal on the next edition. (;


	3. Chapter 3

Monday morning, Yu looks into his best friend’s eyes and prays this is the last time he’ll have to ask him this. “What’s your name?”

All this time later, that blank look devoid of recognition never fails to hurt. But this once, Yu tries to find something worth holding onto in it, and comes up with the way his eyes widen, just a hair, with the raise of his eyebrows when he says, “Yosuke Hanamura.”

“Good to meet you,” Yu says, because time and time again it’s the truth. It always is. “I’m Yu Narukami, I just transferred here from the city.”

Yosuke smiles through a wince, the kind Yu hates because it’s harsh at the corners of his face. Still, he returns it and steadies the handles of his bike gently so Yosuke can pull to his feet. The lock of his knee indicates he’s in more pain than Yu ever gave him credit for initially, but he should have known better. Whether or not he could have stopped the crash entirely, he’s here now and it’s too late, so before Yosuke can even reply, Yu offers, “Do you want to walk to school together?”

They can see it in the distance, it’s really not that far, but Yu banks on the idea he’ll say yes, because he does. “Yeah man, sure.”

He always does, because it’s always them. He wheels his yellow bike at his side and falls in line with Yu’s step, favoring his right foot, and Yu could draw the misshapen spikes of hair underneath his helmet from memory. There hasn’t been a single loop he hasn’t had him. Even if he was slow, or messed up the others, or tried to shut himself out and away from it all, it always ends up on a day like this sooner rather than later, two pairs of feet on concrete gravel, morning air through four lungs.

Organic or pre-ordained, Yosuke says, “I’m from the city, too. Transferred in myself about two months ago.”

“Yeah?” Yu asks just to ask it. A different sort of smile crawls up Yosuke’s face now, lopsided and unsteady, an unpracticed version of something so familiar. It feels like the sun. “Glad I’m not alone.”

Yosuke puts a hand to the back of his head, and Yu gets that tingling in his chest again, déjà vu-adjacent but wholly new to the experience of the past year, where he can’t decide if he’s been in this moment before or living it through anew, because it looks so green, so young. Yu watches Yosuke’s thumb trace a circle over the top knob of his spine before he glances back up, grins, “Yeah, me too.”

It’s the same stage and the same role as ever, and Yu plays it to a T when the scene changes and he has to feign his surprise at their shared homeroom and the serendipitous open desk, sliding behind Yosuke in perfect emulation of someone who thinks nothing of it at all.

Still, when Yosuke twists around to face him, Yu holds his eyes there with a blink, because it can’t be in his head alone and no. It isn’t.

Neither of them has ever been more relieved. 

January, hold steady. 

After school down by the riverfront, Marie asks what he’s doing and he doesn’t really know what to say to that.

She doesn’t even look up from where she’s sitting on the ground throwing rocks out into the water, face slumped in the crook of her hand. Yu does stop what he’s doing, though, which isn’t really more than staring out into the water, but it gives him pause all the same. He takes the easy way out, noncommittal. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, literally, what are you doing,” she clarifies, which really doesn’t change much of anything. She gets a single skip on a stone, which is better than what she’d been doing, but she still sighs in discontent. “Are you crazy or is this just what you do?”

Yu doesn’t really know how to answer that either, but he knows what the truth probably is. “Both, I think.”

He was relieved to see her late in the afternoon after finishing up at Aiya with Yosuke—a steady, familiar face in a sea of ever-changing constants, and getting the moment turned around on him doesn’t make him regret asking her down here. It’s to be expected, but he still feels peeled apart beneath her green eyes, completely clueless to her own whereabouts for the past year yet somehow able to see through him like polished glass.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Marie scoffs, peering at a particular rock she’s picked up in her hand before washing it underneath the river water and pocketing it, tossing the next one into the lake overhand. “There are things you’ve left unanswered, you know.”

Coming right out and telling him off would feel better, he thinks, but he doesn’t exactly have the right to ask for it. Maybe this is her way of saying that. “I know.”

“He’s not even a good person,” Marie follows up. She gets a little skip out of the next rock.

“I know,” Yu says, again. Like he or anyone else needs the reminder.

“Well,” Marie shrugs, returning to her search among the rocks for something flat and smooth, just as he taught her. He didn’t know it would be this refreshing, but a current swells in him at the sight of something in this town that’s moved along with him, someone who’s retained the shadows of time passed and learned. “As long as you know, I guess.”

He missed her too, so much. He really did. Minutes pass in silence, nothing but the sound of thin layers of ice cracking out across the river and the splash of rocks in the water, followed by the appropriate grunt of either disappointment or begrudging approval from the girl at his side.

Night’s beginning to fall, and it’s been itching at the back of Yu’s mind since he saw her by the Velvet Room door. He sits down on the dock and smiles soft when Marie looks up to see them almost eye to eye, her on the bank while he adjusts cross-legged on the wood.

“I’m sorry,” he begins, because he’s not sure there’s any other real way to say it. “I didn’t know what to do. It felt like so much time was running out at once. On so many things.”

Marie’s quiet for a minute at that, picking a stick out of the riverbed and swirling patterns in the water at her feet through the gentle current, back and forth. He wonders if she’s spelling something, some curse or confession, but she’s staring out into the cracks in the ice, somewhere off in the middle distance. 

When she speaks, it’s as slow and winding as the stream. “I get it, I think.”

It doesn’t quite inspire relief, so he continues on anyway. “I knew I could get to you,” he explains, not really knowing if it’s true, but only in the way he can never be sure of anything in the future. It’s always felt assured, whenever he’s thought about it, but he’s not sure if that’s really the strength of their bond informing his intuition or if nothing’s happened yet to threaten the solidity of that notion. Adachi never felt certain. Neither did lots of things. “But there was no fixing this by going forward.”

“By this, you mean him,” she clarifies, and Yu nods, unsure if she sees it out of the corner of her eye. She continues on anyway, so it’s just as well. “I’m lucky I wasn’t here to see the first few hundred tries. I heard you were real stupid.” 

Yu exhales through his nose, short and non-committal, as a form of tacit agreement. Underneath the cracks in the dock, he sees a silver fish glisten under the water’s surface, a breath of life in the winter cold.

“I would have stayed, you know,” he whispers after too long of a pause, transfixed on the creature beneath him. “I wouldn’t have left if everyone wasn’t going to be safe.”

The sun’s starting to set over the mountains in the distance, creeping darkness shrouding the bank in a gnawing chill by degrees, and Yu finds himself, as always, in awe of how Marie never seems to feel it, legs bare to the world beneath her thin tights and not even a wince on her face to betray a reaction. Yu feels cold all the time out here, lately, but she’s always been something different. The curiosity for what has never really been lost on him, he has to believe that, but it feels lit anew now, burning like a small candle inside him. 

Reaching down to the side of the bank underneath the dock, he pulls a rock out of the pile for himself, smoothing out the sand that clings to it. Marie glances over for just a fraction of a second before turning back out to the water. “I don’t know why I wasn’t there before, or why I’m here now. I don’t know where I went. I’m so sick of it.”

Saying it doesn’t make it better, but he has to. “I know. I’m sorry.” 

“But, hey.” With a sigh, she switches the cross of her legs and leans back onto her palms, the strap of her shoulder bag pooling across her chest as she looks up to the sky, painted with wintertime greys and streaks of pink. “This change affected me. That has to mean something, right?”

“Right,” he agrees, shaky, hopeful. He looks up at the sky, too, now that his fish has ducked back deep underneath the ice, and wonders if he has the time to stay here and watch it melt away into the night if he wanted. There hasn’t been that time in so long, it seems, but he wants it now. Needs it, even. “I’ll figure it out. We will. I promise.”

Marie just hums and goes back to tracing her stick circles in the water, but her eyes stay up, unreadable and green. “Just like you’ll figure him out?”

Yu doesn’t know what to say that won’t incriminate him further or dig another hole neither of them needs to travel down tonight, so he just says, “Yeah.”

The first of the stars are beginning to peek through the clouds now, and Yu remembers that he taught her their names, once. He wonders if that’s what she’s doing now, trying to recall them and catalogue where her eyes scan over the clouds. It’s silent as death, but it always is out here, the flow of the river and the low hum of breeze drowning out whatever meager noise the town generates trapped behind the hill. His own little world.

“I just have one question,” she says after what could be minutes, considering that when Yu blinks his attention back down, it’s several shades darker taking her in than when he turned up. “Why him?”

It’s jarring to have asked himself the same thing every single day but never heard it said out loud until now, and it throws him, Yu catching himself on the heels of his palms to lean back and let it wash over him. It’s the question that pounds at the back of his head like a migraine through his waking and unwaking hours, but he fumbles around the syllables of it now, unable to conjure any of the answers left undefined and half-finished in his haste. None of them feel sufficient, let alone honest.

He looks her in the eye and tries anyway. “I think we both easily could have been each other, if things were different.”

He has his defense, a half-smile and a readied stone, up and poised before she even says what he knows she will. “Yeah, no. You’re not… whatever _that_ is.”

He curls his lip up to match her upturned nose, tossing the rock up once, twice in his hand. 

“Maybe not,” he levels, even though he doesn’t agree at all. With a hum, he rolls his wrist for practice, relishing in the familiar crack of the joints. “But I know what being alone can do to someone.”

There’s an audible snap when he sends the stone skimming across the top of the river, cutting sharp waves into the surface with breaking speed. It hits open water three times before skidding to a halt on the ice cloaking the other side, and Marie exhales a held breath at the sight.

“No fair,” she objects, crossing at her ankles with a huff and pulling herself slowly to her feet, adjusting the hair underneath her hat as she looks somewhere over Yu’s shoulder. “You’re cheating.”

She meets him head-on when he pulls himself up too and crosses over to her side, a look in her eyes that is, in her own familiar way, both guarded and fond, judgmental and curious. He meets it how he always does, palms upturned at his side and an expression as open as he knows how to make with the hope she’ll find something she recognizes of herself inside. 

“How so?” Yu asks, even though he has a pretty good idea.

Marie just looks at him like he’s stupid and walks back up the hill, which is fair.

It’s probably better than the truth.

It smells like fried eggs and fresh snow in the morning, Yu stirring early from a combination of light noise from downstairs and still-buzzing leftover adrenaline that pulls him up and out of bed within minutes. Down the stairs, he listens for voices, but he supposes even with no murder case, he should know better than that. Dojima’s jacket is missing from the hallway coat rack and the only sound wafting from the kitchen is the drone of morning talk TV and the sizzle of oil in a pan, and when Yu pads down the rest of the stairs, he can hear Nanako hum.

He lingers in the hall between the stairs and the kitchen for an extra second to make out the tune, an old nursery rhyme. The sound makes him adrift in his body again, caught in the yellow glow of a space that might as well be just as lost in time as the Velvet Room and woven tight in a spinning thread of circumstance that leaves him just off-center of where he’s come to expect to be. It’s been so long living like a rewinding movie reel, turning back on different takes of the same lines, that the foreign melody leaves him degaussed, the reliable images of what he does next fracturing into glass splinters beneath his feet. 

Even without the script, the roles are still intact, but he feels dizzy in the still-darkened window light of the kitchen, like an intruder trapped in a body double close to his own but not quite the original. He stops himself just short of projecting that dissociation onto Nanako, who seems wholly herself in her early morning pajama pants and school dress combo as she diligently babysits two open-faced eggs in the pan, toast and jam already prepared on two separate plates. There’s no reason she wouldn’t be, of course.

It’s such a tired time-travel cliche, he thinks, the phenomenon of something as simple as a butterfly flapping its wings having the potential to shift the entire course of events echoes down the line. Still, he’s reminded by moments like this that, true or not, he’s doing something well beyond that magnitude. 

He’s never heard her sing anything but commercials, pop songs, children’s songs, things of that ilk—she must not know he’s here, or more accurately, she’s not used to his presence yet enough to remember she’s no longer alone. He expects it to sound sad, but it doesn’t. It’s nostalgic, maybe, but perfunctory, Nanako searching and finding every note before sliding into the next. 

He could listen to it for hours, but he can’t linger much longer before he knows she’ll notice, so he asks, “Can I help at all?”

“Oh!” She jumps just a little, spatula slipping between her fingers before she manages to catch it. It aches to see her shoulders slouch into herself and even more to watch her lips fall into a silent line, but he tries not to think about it. It’s bad for his health. “I didn’t know you were awake yet.”

“It’s okay,” he smiles, taking his first tentative steps into the kitchen proper. “It’s a little earlier than normal. What are you making?”

Nanako gestures with a shrug to the pan, cheeks alight with blotches of pink that match her dress. “Eggs, if that’s okay. I was gonna save yours, but you’re here now.”

Without the buffer of Dojima, she’s always harder to crack at first like this, and Yu knows all too well the mistakes he’s made in his haste, the way pushing her too close has made her retreat in the past. How in trying to pull too far he’s made the gap all the harder to bridge. There are so many ways it can be done right, though, but there’s something hard and heavy caught in his throat that makes it nerve-wracking to try and locate one now when he longs for her smile all the more. 

Weighing his options, he crosses the room to her side and observes the pan from a respectable distance. “Looks great, I didn’t know I’d be living with a chef.”

“I can’t cook much.” She reddens at that, too, but there’s a little upward pull of her cheeks hiding beneath her pigtails. “Just eggs and some meat, if it’s already cut up. I’m not allowed to use the knife.”

She flips the eggs with a practiced expertise, and in all the time he’s lived here, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Nanako mess one up, but he’s sure it would be delicious even if she did. He lets his eyes wander across the countertop, a bit disappointed he’s come down so late in the process, but he lands on the four remaining eggs in the carton she’s pulled out and feels his own gears start turning. “Have you made your lunch yet?”

Nanako shakes her head. “Nuh uh.”

“Let’s make rice bowls,” Yu suggests as Nanako deposits one of the eggs on each plate. “We can eat breakfast then cook before we leave, they’re quick. I’ll show you my favorite recipe.”

“Really?” Nanako asks, quiet with wide eyes, stuck in that space between craving connection and still unsure if it’s fully safe to approach. When he nods, she loosens just a bit. “I’d love to!”

Over breakfast, they watch the weather. There’s heavy rain scheduled for next week, and he feels his chest sink at the sight, a hard drop punctuated by how little he knows about what it means this time around. He tries not to let the shake of his hand show as he eats, but Nanako seems oblivious to it anyway, staring out the porch door at a bird on the backyard tree.

Afterward, they clean up, and Yu reminds himself to ask Nanako where the rice cooker is at the last second before reaching for it himself. He talks out loud as he goes through the motions, Nanako flitting at his side like a pixie, asking questions here and there but mostly nodding and retrieving the ingredients he requests. With an eye on the time, he preps a handful of various vegetables and a bit of leftover beef, letting Nanako cut the carrots with his hand over the knife to guide her, much to her delight. 

It’s not until it’s time to take up the rice that Nanako comments on how it seems to be far more than what can serve two people, and in response, Yu just smiles and cracks the first two eggs into a pan. “Well, then we’ll have to take some to a friend.”

Nanako taps the countertop, thoughtful. “I have a friend at school who seems hungry a lot. I should take some to her.”

“That’s a great idea,” Yu smiles, before directing Nanako to fish out some tupperware containers. He divides the rice and vegetables evenly into four boxes and slides the eggs into the two closest to him when they’re done before cracking the remaining open to cook. “I have someone I want to get closer to, so I’ll share it with him.”

“Good,” she decides, definitive as ever. “I wanna cook my eggs, then.”

Yu gratefully moves aside at her declaration and hands her the spatula, trying to hide the naked look of fondness that falls across his face over the fear it’ll be just a degree too open, too visceral to be natural, even to her eyes. It’s hard to fight, though, and he’s sure she catches it once she turns to finish plating the remaining boxes, eggs perfect as ever.

In the remaining few minutes before they have to leave, Yu kneels down on the kitchen floor and gently helps pack Nanako’s lunches in her backpack, careful as he arranges her books not to fold any of the wayward pieces of paper sticking out. 

“Well,” Yu raises his to his feet and adjusts his own bag. “Then I think we’re all set for the day.”

It’s pure reflex when he holds out his hand, but to his surprise, Nanako takes it anyway.

He doesn’t bring lunch to Adachi. But he does think about it. However, despite what Igor thinks, he is capable of some sense of moderation. Occasionally. 

So he does what he says he will, which is what he thought of first anyway, and takes it to school. During composition, he taps Yosuke on the back of his shoulder, wincing at the way he turns around with his whole body in a fittingly brilliant display of conspicuousness. Gently, Yu pushes his shoulder back to face front while whispering, “I brought extra of my lunch. Want to share some?”

Yosuke has the sense to twist only his head back this time, a little sheepish, a lot of open-faced surprise, lips parted and brows furrowed even in a wide arch. “Me?”

There’s no one else it could possibly be, at least as far as Yosuke could be concerned, but that’s always been part of his charm. “Yeah, you.”

“Sweet,” he grins, voice edged with no small amount of confusion fighting for space with that charmingly unadulterated enthusiasm. “Count me in.”

Underneath the desk, Yu swings his foot out to tap Yosuke’s calf, lest either of them gets called out for talking. He doesn’t know about Yosuke for sure, but he has a feeling both of their first weeks were embarrassing enough without extra reasons to be put under the wrong spotlight. 

Still, out of the corner of Yosuke’s face in front of him, Yu swears he can see a smile. He knows he’s wearing one himself.

Lunch swings around and Yosuke turns his whole desk to face his, watching with his chin propped on crossed arms as Yu procures the two boxes of rice from his bag. It’s too cold for the roof by a mile—there was a point in November and December in the original line where they bore it anyway, but by then there were too many of them who weren’t in their class, and it had become so indelibly their spot it was worth the cold to maintain their claim to it. Here, though, there’s no reason to subject themselves to that, so Yu hands Yosuke a pair of spare chopsticks from his bag as well.

“This looks great dude,” Yosuke exclaims, a thankful bit of steam still rising up when he opens the lid. Yu opens his own, and he has to admit, it does. “Did you make it?”

“My little cousin and I, yeah,” Yu replies, cutting into the egg with his chopsticks to break it up as he prefers. His original Yosuke always used to make fun of him for it, and he can’t decide if it hurts or helps that the one in front of him raises an eyebrow, but stays silent. “There were an odd amount of eggs, so I made more than we needed.”

“Well, thanks.” Yosuke puts a piece of beef between his teeth, and Yu swears he sees a band of red across his cheekbones. It’s gone when he swallows it down, the color left just on the tip of his nose. “It’s been a while since I…”

Yu thinks he knows the end to that sentence, or at least a few things it could be. It’s been a while since he’s had a home-cooked meal, been a while since someone’s reached out to him like this, been a while since he’s made a friend, been a while since… But Yosuke never gets to finish it, and Yu runs out of time to ruminate on it, because the reason he’s faded out announces herself soon enough with a flash of green and yellow.

“Oooh, what’s that?” Chie asks, Yu turning to see her and Yukiko now up from their desks and standing above them, thick as thieves in their complementary colorful ensembles. He’s not sure what he expected, but it’s a relief to see them the same as they ever were, their stances and cadence so familiar. They left right after school yesterday before he even got a chance to do anything but stare at the back of their heads, and Yu tries to swallow down whatever the sound of her voice makes him feel. She looks away from the beef belatedly, like she’s only just now realized someone else is here. “Oh, hey, aren’t you the transfer student?”

“That’s me,” Yu replies, teasing at a piece of carrot. “I made rice bowls. Want to try a bite?”

Yosuke’s face pales and he shoves two pieces of beef into his mouth on reflex, speaking inelegantly between them. “Don't do that, dude.”

With a pleasant nod of acknowledgment, Yu puts two pieces of his own beef between his chopsticks and holds them out. Chie honestly looks like she’s about to take it with her bare hands, which wouldn’t surprise him, but Yukiko pivots back to their desks in a flash and hands Chie her set of chopsticks, plastic with little stylized action sound effect kanji at the top. She rolls her eyes and takes the meat from Yu, sizing him up and down shamelessly before putting it to her mouth. 

She chews once, twice, then exclaims, as loud as Yu is accustomed to from her yet still jarring him out of his skin, “Hell yeah! Now that’s some meat!”

Yu beams, because no one in the world is a better barometer for his carnivorous-based cooking than her. He’s about to reply, something about the marinade, when Chie reaches over to slap him open-hand on the back, chopsticks nearly stabbing straight to the back of his mouth. “Good going, new kid!”

He goes to mutter his thanks, but once again it’s swallowed up before it begins with Yukiko’s soft, but firm request of, “May I try a few carrots?”

She’s always so shy at the start, so tight to Chie’s shadow, and Yu’s long past losing count of how many times today he’s had to fight a reaction too strong for the moment since this morning, but this is one of the harder ones to bite the corners of his lips down on. Still, Yukiko’s smile is kind as she takes it, and widens at the taste. “Thank you.”

Out of the corner of his eye, a familiar scene starts to play out: Chie looming ever closer to a Yosuke clutching his lunchbox ever tighter to his chest. As practiced as if they never left, Yu and Yukiko remain motionless on the other side, watching quietly from their vantage points as it unfolds.

“You know,” Chie drawls, a hand on her hip while the other twirls her chopsticks between her fingers. “You totally owe me for that math homework the other week.”

“It was one time!” Yosuke combs the rice bed for as much remaining meat as his chopsticks can hold, barely intelligible when he continues speaking. Yu’s known him long enough to figure it out, though. “Half your answers weren’t even right.”

“It’s still cheating.” Chie’s clearly known him long enough for that as well, but it still leaves Yu wondering just how acquainted Yosuke was with the two of them before he came around. He’s never been able to tell for sure.

“You let me!” Yosuke objects, noisily swallowing his remaining beef and unable to make more than an offended garble of noises when Chie reaches in to grab a spare piece he’d missed. When he’s able to speak, he sputters, “No fair, this is a gift!”

“Is it?” Chie looks back at Yu with a tilt of her head, not so much judgment as it is full surprise, but she wears them the same in her countenance. 

Yu holds up his hands in acquiescence, fishing out two more pieces of carrot to spare for Yukiko just to even the playing field. She takes them with grace, and he tactfully ignores the holes Chie’s burning in his own box. “I’ll bring something for you two tomorrow, if you really want it to be fair.”

Chie gives a long, thoughtful hum, crossing her arms and leaning back against an empty desk, tapping her cheek in thought. “You know, it’s really Yosuke that has something to make up to me.”

Subtle as possible, Yu reaches for another piece of meat and turns it over a little in the light of the window before putting it between his teeth, taking each bite slow and doing his best to act ignorant to the heat of her focus. 

“It can be from both of us,” Yosuke insists, looking back to Yu with wild eyes for his approval, which he gives with a tilt of his head and a barely-there wink. Yosuke seems to catch it, though, lips turning up in an uneven line. “Then we’re even, right?”

Another hum from Chie, this one at a distinctly higher pitch and much shorter before falling off. “Make steak skewers.”

“Be sure to include a good vegetable medley,” Yukiko pipes up, cementing that these two have always been and always will be best friends.

Once upon a time, this might have annoyed him, but right now, at this moment, in this timeline, it’s never felt more like a victory. “You’re on.”

All three of them are occupied after school—Yosuke with Junes, Yukiko with the Inn, and Chie with Yukiko, leaving Yu, once again, to his own devices. 

His own devices, as they frequently do, find him heading back down towards the river. He crosses through the shopping district first and takes his time as he passes through, moving slow to peer through the windows. There’s a slight young man shelving bottles at the liquor store, but no sign of the textile shop owner’s son inside that storefront. He has to stop himself from lingering at the Marukyu with the reminder of snow fresh on the ground, and the shrine is too crowded with people to call the fox out yet. It’s disappointing, though it’s far from the first time he’s wandered these streets wanting too much too soon. But compared to the vibrancy of the day, he can’t help but feel a bit dimmed as he turns towards the floodplain, the quiet of Inaba sinking in his bones. 

From the relative bustle of the shopping center, the floodplain is serene. The chill keeps out most of its usual denizens, and the already-setting sun only contributes to its stillness, any of its potential warmth already long trapped behind the clouds. Besides the odd mother and child heading towards the park or middle-aged man smoking under the shade of a tree, the only thing he can hear is the echo of his own footsteps. It certainly lends him a clear ear to anything that disrupts the silence—like the distinct crack of ice over the river.

Leisurely, he makes his way past the line of trees that obscure the riverbank below, but takes the steps down it two at a time when he sees the source: a thin man with a mop of haphazard black hair and dark grey peacoat facing away from him at the water’s edge. Yu slows at the end of the staircase, hands in his pockets, and crosses up towards the shore.

“Are you off-duty?” Yu tries to make his voice as smooth and unobtrusive as possible, but Adachi still jumps at the sound, shoulders wiring together as he reels to face him, staggering backward a few steps. 

“Jesus, kid,” Adachi huffs, adjusting the lay of his tie beneath his open jacket. Yu tries not to stare into his bloodshot eyes, tries to pretend instead like he cares more about how his tie still isn’t straight even though it never will be. “It’s creepy to sneak up on a guy.”

“Sorry,” Yu shrugs, even though he’s not. Adachi’s face is flushed from the cold but pales with embarrassment, a little trick of the weather Yu has to blink away his fascination with, flickering his eyes over to the water and back. “I come down here a lot.”

Adachi stares at him, a second or so passing over his frozen expression before he seems to remember Yu’s question, shrugging. His coat is the smallest size they had in the store, but even it seems to be just a little too broad for Adachi’s shoulders, falling lopsided over his neck before he reaches up to adjust it. “Nah, I’m on the clock.”

Yu presses his lips into a line, stretching it across his chilled cheeks. “That’s a shame.”

With another adjustment of his collar, Adachi slips a degree further into his practiced slouch, scratching at the side of his face with cold-cracked fingers. Yu makes a mental note to buy him gloves, or at least decent lotion. It hasn’t slipped his notice Adachi’s other hand hasn’t left his pocket.

“I’m on an assignment,” Adachi sighs, but it comes out too harsh between his teeth to quite be believably authentic. His brows fall into such harsh, pressed lines when they furrow, like he’s fighting their fall and trying to soften them up without quite succeeding. Yu wants to trace it. He wishes, deliriously, he already had. “My first one, yippie.”

It’s hard not to laugh, because he shouldn’t and it’s rude without context, but the absolutely bare sarcasm masquerading as sincere joy is just so alien and bizarre Yu has to hide his reaction behind his scarf, playing it off as a cough. It’s beyond him how no one else can see it, and Yu doesn’t know if it’s revisionist history at this point, but it feels like he’s always been able to catch him out. In moments like this, at least. 

“I bet it’s something _real_ exciting,” Yu drawls as he kicks at a rock underneath his feet, shiny and pink. He looks up at Adachi under his bangs in an attempt to convey his own humor, and relief floods over him like river water when Adachi scoffs and twitches out a smile. “Let me guess, helping old ladies cross the road?”

Adachi won’t give him his real laugh, not yet and maybe not ever, but he’ll settle just fine for the one that erupts when something takes him off guard by striking him just so, like a clattering of jagged rocks torn from his throat. It’s ugly, and Yu wants it on loop. As always, though, it ends too soon. 

“Yeah, pretty close.” Adachi shoves his other hand back in his pocket too, leaning back on his heels. “I gotta find a lost cat. Because apparently that’s an effective use of police force in this town.”

The _‘what a joke’_ that almost certainly follows in his head is projected so strongly from other moments in their dynamic where he’d just say it out loud, but it’s just a ghost on the wind in this one, so Yu does the work for him. “Wow, I guess this place really is that boring.”

“Tell me about it.” Adachi tosses his head back, more dramatic than Yu’s sure he intends, greasy fringe falling across his eyes. He makes another note for a better shampoo; he knows which ones have worked from other trials. Yu thought it would be a harder sell than it historically has ended up being. “I thought the police were here to solve crimes, not do petty chores for housewives.”

“Have you found it?” Yu offers, because if he knows Adachi—and in his best moments he thinks he at least understands enough—he’s about ten seconds away from the realization he’s maybe shown too much and smoothing it over with a forced laugh, so hollow and unlike the one he wants to keep freshest in his mind. So he opts out of that part of the schtick, relishing in Adachi’s head turning back down to him inch by inch. 

“Well, wouldn’t be out here if I had, right?” Adachi still chuckles at that in a tone Yu doesn’t love, but he’ll take it, because it at least has the decency to edge itself with a sadness he recognizes deep within the folds of forced cheer. It’s short and ends quickly, which is also a mercy. “It’s supposedly around here but I’ve been at it for hours. I don’t even wanna think about Dojima’s reaction if I come back from my first assignment empty-handed, though, so here I am.”

“I think I have an idea.” Yu pretends to ponder this for much longer than he does in reality, but when the appropriate amount of time has passed, he reaches into his bag and pulls out a small tackle box from the back compartment and the fold-up pole he keeps tucked in there beside it, lowering down into the rock on one knee to arrange them. 

“What is that?” Adachi asks with a curl of his nose, reminding Yu once again that Adachi, the perpetual city-boy he is, has never gone fishing in his life—until whenever Yu takes him. 

“Cats are food-motivated.” Yu looks up for only a blink before turning down to open the tackle box and thread the line through a hook, resting his pole on the edge of his knee as he works. It may not be the exact cat he’s thinking of, but he readies some of his best bait over the hook anyway, tying off the line with a practiced flourish before opening up the pole to its full length and rising to his feet. “So, you’re more likely to catch it if you have something it wants.”

Instead of reacting to any of that, Adachi just looks between Yu and the pole in his hand several times before he mutters the inevitable, “You fish?”

“Yeah.” Yu offers a grin over his shoulder as he steps up onto the docks, scanning the water for movement underneath the open patches free of ice. “It’s really calming, actually.”

Adachi gives a small click of his tongue at that, but takes a few measures steps closer to the docks anyway, hovering just slightly in Yu’s periphery. “I don’t know how killing something can be calming, but sure.”

It’s the funniest thing Adachi’s said all loop, but somehow, it’s a little bit easier to resist laughing out loud this time around. “It’s more about the experience.”

Yu casts the line out into a patch of deep blue and reels out the excess slack, and just the feeling of the pole’s weight in his hands sends a jet of calm up through his hands; his heart rate, which he wasn’t even aware had been elevated, slows down to match the swaying pull of the water on the line. He feels rather than sees Adachi’s eyes follow him, and for a moment, he wonders if he’ll even dignify that with a reply, or just wait until he manages to catch something. 

“The experience, huh,” Adachi mutters after several moments of quiet, Yu staring at the blobs of movement under the water moving closer and closer to his line. “Of what?”

Just then, something tugs sharp at his line, and Yu moves into position, bracing himself through his feet as he pulls back and reels it in. Despite himself, he ignores the shadow of Adachi moving ever closer to him and instead narrows in on the patterns of the fish, fighting until the stopper hits the top of his pole and he can pull his line the rest of the way out of the water. There’s a moderately sized, gloriously colored trout on the other end, and Yu relishes in the familiar rush of accomplishment that flows through him, gesturing back to Adachi with a jerk of his head.

“There’s a thing that looks like a link of thick chain in the box down there.” Yu tries to indicate in the vague direction of it with his elbow. “Can you grab that for me?”

Over his shoulder, Adachi’s face pales several shades. “It’s not covered in fish guts, right?”

“It’s clean.” Yu doesn’t quite resist the urge to roll his eyes, but he’s not sure Adachi notices. “It’s just so I can wash it off in the water and make sure it doesn’t die slowly.” 

“Well, at least there’s that.” Adachi mutters something else after that Yu doesn’t catch, but he gets the piece of equipment with little outward complaint. The brush of Adachi’s hands in his open palm as he hands it over is like strangely clammy sandpaper. Gloves and lotion both, he decides. 

Yu thanks him, and adds, “You don’t have to watch.”

Adachi takes him at his word with a pivot on his heel and doesn’t turn back around until Yu has returned to the tackle box with clean fish in hand, Yu gently placing it on a spare bandana he keeps inside. When he does, Yu’s holding a small knife and stares at him blankly until Adachi looks away again, pretending to be very interested in the sway of a nearby tree.

After he’s cut the meat into small pieces placed in a ziplock with the rest sealed up in a miniature compost bag, he rises to his feet and falls back at Adachi’s side, and only then does Adachi dare to look his way this time. 

“The gross part’s over,” Yu assures, and Adachi tries and miserably fails to look convinced of that enough to fool him. Others maybe would be, but even in the times he’s gotten Adachi to tolerate being out here with him, he’s always hated this part. It makes him nauseous on the best days, and Yu can see a tinge of green to him even now, though his face is turned up to hide it. With everything else put away, Yu opens up the ziplock of meat, holding it out to Adachi who takes it with nothing but his fingernails as if it might explode. “If the cat really is close to here, you can scatter a few pieces around and it should come to you.”

“Uh,” Adachi stares into the bag, looking slightly sweaty but mostly just blank, a hard edge to his eyes Yu knows by now is confusion edged with annoyance, but Yu knows well enough not to take it personally. “Thanks, kid.”

“Don’t mention it.” Yu smiles and packs up the rest of his box, holding onto the scraps for the compost bin by the park up the stairs. When his bag is slung over his shoulder, he makes his way back towards the top of the floodplain, sending a pleasant look over his shoulder like he has no idea what he’s just done. In a way, maybe he doesn’t. “Like I said, I love fishing.”

Yu tries not to think too hard about the expression he leaves behind on Adachi’s face: a little raw, a lot of lost. It’ll just make him miss something he’s not supposed to have known yet.

Later, when Dojima exclaims his surprise at the city rookie completing his first backwater town assignment, Yu does a fantastic job of acting like he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Sometimes, he’s a better actor than he gives himself credit for. If he has to pretend through these first parts, that’s fine. He can pretend.

There might just be something worth waiting for on the other side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some fast facts: One, I refuse to commit to a real schedule because they scare me. Two, I still absolutely wrote over half of this in the span of three hours out of a desire to not be too late relative to my last update, and also possible demonic possession. Three, [wwaywwardVvagabond](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wwaywwardVvagabond/) is my outliner, beta, and muse, a combination I am eternally grateful for but do not envy because I am a hot mess. Four, I have no idea how long this will be but they keep telling me it's going to be pretty long and I'd believe them. Five, I am on [twitter](https://twitter.com/sovietminds) and [tumblr](https://historians.tumblr.com/).


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